Tag Archives: Enlightenment

The reflection about the category of prejudice has been one of the biggest themes of modern thinking from the scientific revolution through the Enlightenment and Positivism, up to the twentieth-century debate about the philosophy of science. The theme of prejudice intersects with the one of nature, of knowledge and of the obstacles that prevent a correct comprehension of reality. This reflection comes primarily from Francis Bacon. He identifies the purification of the intellect from “idola”(prejudices) which blind the mind, as the first step of the quest for knowledge. It goes on with Descartes’s theory. According to him, the first act of the new philosophy is the choice to separate the mind from the senses and to free the mind of prejudice: “quin etiam nullis author sum ut haec legant, nisi tantùm iis qui seriò mecum meditari, metemque a sensibus, simulque ab omnibus praejudiciis, abducere poterunt ac volent”.[1] This reflection leads to the great Enlightenment’s fight against superstition and prejudices, sources of distortion of our knowledge of the world and of social discriminations. Voltaire says that prejudice “est une opinion sans jugement. Ainsi dans toute la terre on inspire aux enfants toutes les opinions qu’on veut, avant qu’ils puissent juger.”[2] And he goes on saying that, even if not all prejudices are false and negative, it’s useful to submit them to the judgments of reason in order to recognize which of them are the good ones: “ceux que le jugement ratifie quand on raisonne.[3]

Kant is amazed that someone could ask himself if prejudices are useful, and goes on saying: “Es ist zum Erstaunen, daß in unserm Zeitalter dergleichen Fragen, besonders die wegen Begünstigung der Vorurteile, noch können aufgegeben warden”.[4] Prejudices are source of wrong judgments and are caused by the lack of reflection, because prejudices are temporary judgments taken as principles or definitive judgments.[5] Moreover, Kant goes on saying that prejudices aren’t singular concepts; in fact, it is not a prejudice to affirm that an individual is dishonest, but it would be a prejudice to extend that assessment to a whole category of people.[6] Prejudice is therefore an undeserved generalization.

D’Holbach resumes with more radical tones the position of the Enlightenment about this theme: “L’ignorance, les erreurs et les préjugés des hommes sont les sources de leurs maux. La vérité doit tôt ou tard triompher de l’erreur.”[7] The fight against prejudice has not only the aim to open the way to the real knowledge of reality; it’s the unavoidable step of progressive individual and social improvement. Experience and reason are essential to triumph on prejudices[8] and the instrument is instruction:

D’Holbach continues by saying that the most efficient of the two ways is the second one, because illuminated chiefs can die and be substituted by despots, while an “instruit et raisonnable” population can’t die. From this extended debate about prejudice, here summarily outlined, emerge some distinctive elements of the concept in matter. Prejudice is a pre-established opinion, a rush to judgment, lacking of a rational justification or of precise knowledge of the judged object, a conviction made up without any foundation. It acquires a negative value with hard social consequences.

Obviously, we must remember as well the critics who spoke against the Enlightenment’s and positivist traditions. I mean the reassessment of prejudice that finds its highest expression in Gadamer’s theory. Prejudice is the pre-comprehension, that is the knowledge that pre-exists the experience and so it’s a condition of making a reflective judgment about the world. In a hermeneutics perspective, prejudice is the necessary intuitive pre-cognition that the interpreter can’t leave out of consideration. Gadamer distinguishes between positive and negative reading of the term “prejudice”. The positive prejudice makes comprehensions possible while the negative obstacles and hardens it. The difference between the two isn’t in the bigger or in the smaller correspondence to the real world. On the contrary, both negative and positive prejudices can’t be preventively distinguished. The distinction becomes clear during the process of understanding. The subject consciously uses them in an endless debate with the other possible “horizons of sense”.[12]

In the wake of these philosophical debates the great and complex analysis of psychology has been gradually introduced with the discussion between cognitivism and constructivism. The social-constructivist approach seems to be close to the criticism of the Enlightenment’s tradition developed by Gadamer and the hermeneutical approach. Social constructivism develops a particular attention for the language understood as an instrument of interpretation of the world and of comparison of “horizons of sense”. On the other hand, studies about the definition of prejudice as a cognitive mistake have been developed. For example, Allport which inserts the emotional element in the cognitivist definition: “Prejudice is an antipathy based on faulty and inflexible generalization. It may be felt or expressed. It may be directed toward a group or an individual of a group.”[13]

During the years, more or less successful strategies against prejudices developed strategies tending to eliminate and reduce them. Gordon Allport himself developed already 60 years ago the hypothesis of contact. If prejudices come from a lack of knowledge among different groups, the contact with individuals of the out-groups will help to discover that a lot of prejudices and stereotypes are wrong. Recent researches have however underlined that prejudices is higher in towns with more immigrants, where the possibilities of a contact are higher.[14] So contact and knowledge do not always bring to more positive relationships.

We don’t want to underline these analyses here, even if they are important and fruitful. We want to leave from a question: did we really destroy or at least attenuate the negative strength of prejudices after centuries of fight against it? Actually, prejudices exist and they’ll always and always continue to direct collective and social life, and they often foment aversion and hostility towards other individuals, groups, nations and races. The idea of the Enlightenment that prejudice is to be fought with rational and objective knowledge freeing us from fast and preconceived opinions, as well as the position of hermeneutics calling for an awareness capable to distinguish the prejudices able to produce new cognitive horizons from the ones that stop it and render the vision of the world infertile, does not seem able to produce fully efficient strategies of liberation.

In order to understand this difficulty, I’d like to go back to the beginning of the reflection about prejudice made in modern thinking, and specifically to that author, who can’t be easily put in any simplistic category: Spinoza. He is hardly categorizable because his doctrine puts itself in the confluence of different traditions: the Renaissance’s immanentist naturalism,[15] the re-elaborations of elements already present in medieval philosophy[16] and in Jewish thinking,[17] and the study of the new mathematical science of nature. All this makes Spinoza not so much a forerunner of the radical Enlightenment,[18] but an “anomalous” thinker, as Toni Negri writes, an atypical modernity.[19] This atypical modernity can perhaps allow us to shed light on the complex phenomenon of prejudice. According to Spinoza, this phenomenon lies at the confluence of different elements: language, habit, experience, and daily morality.

Spinoza is among those who think that it’s necessary to remove prejudices from the mind, prejudices “quae impedire poterant quominus meae demonstrationes percipererunt”.[20] In his writings, we find a very long list of prejudices: the final causality attributed to God or to nature; the illusion of human free will; moral concepts of right and wrong, merit and sin, reward and punishment; the aesthetic concepts of beautiful and ugly, perfection and imperfection, order and confusion; concepts elaborated by theologians; miracles as a God’s works that lie outside the natural order.[21]

According to Spinoza, where do all these prejudices that he enumerates come from? Spinoza’s reflection about the category of prejudice runs through different levels, from the epistemological to the political one and it strictly connects to his theory of language.[22] Spinoza didn’t write a treatise on language, but nearly every one of his writings attempts some analysis of language. Let’s see what he says about this subject.

Words are conventional and arbitrary signs of things “prout sunt in imaginatione”.[23] Signs are images in the way explained by the scholium of the second part of his E. after proposition 17, that is affections of the human body whose ideas represent to us exterior bodies as if they were present to us. These images, as Spinoza explains, aren’t figures or the more or less objective reproduction of things. They are the product of interaction of our body with other bodies and they simultaneously express both the power of our body and the power of other bodies. Images are bodily traces of these meetings that “say” of both bodies, and that “confuse” both bodies in a unique sign. The body’s affection corresponding to the idea of this affection is what Spinoza calls “affect”. In turn affect expresses the increased or decreased power of the body (corporis agendi potentia).[24] Thus language is a web of patterns of affectivity.

The origin of the language is so explained thanks to the body.[25] In this way language is part of an immediate and not adequate knowledge, and so it’s always the expression of a confused knowledge. There is a double confusion: in front of the infinite complexity of reality, the human body, which is finite for definition, makes a process of practical simplification of which language is one of the products. In the scholium of proposition 40 E.II, when Spinoza explains to us the origin of the notions we call “Transcendental” and “Universal”, he illustrates this process of confusion and simplification. Our limited body is able to form just a limited number of distinct images. When the number of images becomes excessive, Spinoza says that images will be confused in the body and also the mind will be unable to distinguish all those images, and therefore it will apply only one tag: that is a general term, a word (e.g. a being, a thing, a man, a horse, etc.). Language is what is used to classify.[26]

It’s interesting to remember the development of the “term” human being. When the human body is affected by a lot of traces that form a lot of images of man as the mind can’t record the distinctive traits of each human being, such as his colour or his height, it tends to clearly imagine just those aspects that have almost the same effect on the body, i.e. those aspects that hit it with more vividness and that the mind more easily reminds: the term “man” (human being) will be applied to this group of aspects. But Spinoza goes on saying that those aspects that the mind retains with more vividness, can change in each individual according to the particular “ingenium” (temper) of the individual itself or the particular tendency to admire some aspects more than others:

The word is a sign easy to remember and has a recognising function, which consists of advising that an object or a situation is already been recognised, i.e. that it is already known. This memory process of terms organises itself according to the concatenation of bodily affections:

The word is a sign that, moreover and above all, tells us about the relationship we establish between things and the use we usually do of them in relation with our needs: “Nam miles exempli gratia vivis in arena equi vestigiis statim ex cogitatione equi in cogitationem aratri, agri etc. incidet et sic unusquisque prout rerum imagines consuevit hoc vel alio modo jungere et concatenare, ex una in hanc vel aliam incidet cogitationem.”[29]

Words belong to the imagination, while language is the product of the immediate knowledge of the first immediate answer to our need. In the interaction with things, the body keeps traces of what more positively answers to the survival effort. In Spinoza’s terms, it increases or decreases its power to act, and we give a name to it. Language doesn’t tell us about the truth of things. We mustn’t search the meaning of words in the content of truth, but in its practical value, in its use value. For example, Spinoza says to us that the first meaning (prima significatio) of “true” and “false” seems to come from narrations: these tales have been called “true” when the told fact had really (revera) happened; a fact that had happened nowhere, instead, was called “false”.[30] Here Spinoza puts in mutual relation the meaning of a word with an experience. And the experience has not a secondary place in Spinoza thinking, even if the majority of commentators deny the importance of the experience in the rationalist philosophy of the author of E. Returning to the acute observations by P.F. Moreau,[31] it is worth remembering that in his works, Spinoza does not strive to give the experience the lowest place as possible; on the contrary, in all his works experience is often shown with positive traits, and not only as the “vague experience” of the first kind of knowledge. Expressions such as “experientia docet”, “experientia docuit”, “experientia suadet”, “experientia monstrat”, “experientia comprobat”, “experientia confirmat” are frequent in all his works, including E.. Experience theaches, then; but what does it teach?

We have just one excerpt where Spinoza directly speaks about experience. In letter X to Simon de Vries,[32] Spinoza tells us that experience is necessary for that of which essence doesn’t involve existence: the “modi”. In other words, experience let us know facts that can’t be deducted from the definition of the object. It’s not just the existence of the finished modi; it’s something more: our actions, our soul’s affective impulses, all the infinite variations of our being, living and acting that are made by the meeting of our essence with the things surrounding us. We are not able to deduce “more geometrico” the infinite variety of the human events; we can just see them after that experience has presented them to us. However, we must pay a lot of attention: the teaching of experience has got some limits. Since experience does not teach about the essence, it never shows the cause of things, and it’s not able to tell us when such causes cease to act and others intervene. In any case, what experience tells us is always real. Experience does not cheat: it’s the reading that we do of experience that can be wrong. The ideologies, myths, superstitions and prejudices and also the language, with which we human beings redress the facts, prevent most times to take advantage from experience.

Language is also and in the same time the product of interaction of human bodies among them. In other terms, language is a social product. Therefore, Spinoza says, it’s common people who find and invent new words: “vulgus vocabula primum invenit.” Language is a product of collective interaction; it’s the language (langue) of a population. And, as such, it’s immediately in relation with collective experiences and needs of that population. Only later, with a metaphoric translation (metaphorice translata est) do “philosophers” use terms to indicate the agreement of an idea with its object and begin using them to indicate things. “Atque hanc philosophi postea usurparunt ad denotandam convenientiam ideae cum suo ideato”.[33] And so, when we use the terms “true” and “false” about, for example, gold, it’s as the represented gold told something about itself: it told that it’s or it’s not gold. But, as Spinoza continues, from the point of view of the meaning, this is an illegitimate use of words. This way to give meanings to the words is just rhetorical, and it has not a cognitive aim, but only a practical use for persuasion. It can open to manipulation and domination.

A word does not guarantee the correspondence between representations and things. Human beings (all together as vulgus) understand their relation to things not in the order of truth, but in relation to their immediate needs, through bodily affections. The analysis about the terms “true” and “false” of CM is the first example of what P. F. Moreau[34] called an operation of “philosophical etymology” that Spinoza will repeat in the fourth part of his E. for the term “perfect” and in the TTP for the term “Law”. Thanks to this operation of philosophical etymology, Spinoza shows in the appendix of the first part of his Ethics how the finalist prejudice always requires a critical analysis of language based on this philosophical etymology.

We remember that language is invented by the “vulgus”, i.e. by common people, by ignorant people, and so it’s from the beginning (ab origine) connected to inadequate ideas. The “genetic” or generative cause of language is imagination. That means that it belongs to the order and structure of this kind of spontaneous knowledge; this knowledge that Spinoza calls “cognitio ab experientia vaga”, where “vaga” means wandering, precarious, without a precise direction. Obviously, the word as a sign of an inadequate knowledge conserves a trace of the actual idea, but this idea of affection of the bodies of common people in the interaction with other bodies is an inadequate and confused idea: it’s an image. And the word as the term that designates this idea is the image of an image. The totality of words leans on the mechanism of memory thanks to some disposition of the body: “verba… prout vage et aliqua dispositiones corporis componuntur in memoria.”[35]

We said that the improper use of words can open to the manipulation and to the subjection. Spinoza warns us that prejudices and superstitions are not only the product of manipulation of dominants over the dominated ones. They can rise spontaneously. Let’s suppose for example a group of individuals that live together. These people are common people who don’t use reason, but live under the yoke of imagination. They impose names to images born from affections of their bodies that interact with each other. As we have already see their imagination is not able to distinguish every specific aspect of each individual, but it will fix in mind those aspects that, for their inclination and habit, strike them most: white skin, size, colour of eyes and hair, etc. This image of human being has characteristics corresponding exactly to the instinctive bent of the group, and to what causes admiration. These individuals are so brought to recognise that sort of human being as the neighbour, and they find the term “man” to designate it. Considering the term as the object they will tend not to recognise as man or human being individuals that don’t fit well with that image. Racial prejudice is thus born.

If then we consider that the effects are an idea of the mind to which an affection of the body corresponds at the same time, and that when the mind has confused and inadequate ideas it’s passive, and that a confused idea is a passion of the soul, then we understand that prejudice is inevitably accompanied by a passion: admiration for the counterpart, diffidence or fear for the different, etc. And since men tend by nature to strictly associate when they fall prey to a common passion such as hope, fear or common desire of revenge,[36] prejudice (which always goes with a passion) risks of being among the natural foundations of political society. However, what characterises a society of human beings, a nation from another, has not its origins in nature. Nature just creates individuals. The habit, the reiterated experience of custom and laws shape the people’s “ingenium”. In the TTP, Spinoza wonders why the Jewish people had moved away so often from the observance of the laws. Was it by nature? No, he answers. The language, the laws and the customs distinguish a community from another and it is just from this the particular nature of a community that its condition and its prejudices derive.[37] Through the language, the customs and the laws, prejudices shape the character of a community, and therefore they participate in the constitutive power of imagination. At the same time, individual and collective experiences are often misinterpreted by prejudices.

How can we escape from the chain of prejudices? Is knowledge—theoretical, rational—enough to modify prejudices that revealed to be behavioural attitudes, collective affects in addition to illusory tales? Without going back to all aspects of Spinoza’s theory, I’m going to touch upon some suggestions that we can infer from his theory to develop strategies for liberation.

First, we must remember what Spinoza demonstrates in the fourth part of his E.. Till the real knowledge of good and bad remains purely theoretical, it doesn’t modify the human condition; on the contrary, it risks making it worse, because it’s unarmed in front of the power of the affects.[38] It’s therefore useful to develop a strategy of the affects—what Spinoza does in the fourth part of his E., where he develops what P. Macherey calls “a daily ethics” that “introduit dans l’espace qui paraît séparer la servitude de la liberté toutes un monde de nuances microscopiques, de determinations intermediaires”.[39] This strategy of the affects can’t get out of being also a strategy of the language. Perhaps this is also the very difficult (perardua) way which Spinoza speaks about at the end of his E.; very difficult because, as we have seen, language is a sign of inadequate knowledge, corresponding the bondage of passions. The dominion of words is such that also philosophy remained prisoner of words and has fallen into a lot of mistakes: “Attamen non miror philosophos verbales, sive grammaticales in similes errores incidere: res enim ex nominibus judicant.”[40] Nevertheless, at the heart of the philosophical project, Spinoza puts the achievement of a Real Good that is communicable.[41]

How can we communicate, speak and, for the philosopher, write, in order to stay clear from illusions, mistakes and prejudices of the imagination, if the language takes root in the imagination?

Spinoza’s answer is not the one to create another language, as for example mathematics did. Neither we can change the language that means to eliminate some words, in order to create others or substitute them with others. We have to transformer the use of the language, by using the same words, the words of common use, to signify something else: “Haec nomina ex communi usu aliud significare scio. Sed meum institutum non est verborum significationem sed rerum naturam explicare easque iis vocabulis indicare quorum significatio quam ex usu habent, a significatione qua eadem usurpare volo, non omnino abhorret, quod semel monuisse sufficiat.”[42] That’ s what Spinoza does in his E., when he asks himself about definitions. But not only this; the whole of Spinoza’s work urges attention and caution in the use of language: “Caute”. In the whole E., he uses this motto just once and exclusively when referring to human language: “Nam quia haec tria, imagines scilicet verba et ideae, a multis vel plane confunduntur vel non satis accurate vel denique non satis caute distinguuntur”.[43] Caution in the use of words, caution in expressions, caution in the use of metaphors.

Spinoza’s philosophical etymology is therefore a criticism of the use of language, which results into a double consciousness.

First: language is a collective product and it’s meant for the community. Also, the philosophic discourse can be a discourse that really redirects the human being on the real communicable good, when it is within common people’s reach, when language can bond with the common people, and thus prepare them to listen to the truth: “Ad captum vulgi loqui, et illa omnia operari, quae nihil impedimenti adferunt, quominus nostrum scopum attingamus. Nam non parum emolumenti ab eo possumus acquirere, modo ipsius captui, quantum fieri potest, concedamus ; adde, quod tali modo amicas praebebunt aures ad veritatem audiendam.”[44] Modifying the use of language can’t be just the work of a person or of a group of intellectuals. The wiser person too is always exposed to the danger of the passions and so she’s exposed to the risk of obtuseness; but human beings can also correct their faults by examining the questions, listening, discussing and trying all the intermediate solutions to find what nobody had already thought.[45]

Second: language has an ambiguous strength in itself; words are useful to produce transformations towards the better or the worse. When we make an improper use of it, unknowingly or deliberately, and we manipulate the meanings, the effect can be the loss of individual or social freedom. From here follows Spinoza’s call for caution and attention in the use of words, but at the same time the lack of any specific strategy of and about language divided from that strategy for mastering affects, i.e. the daily morality in the fourth part of his E.

[1] René Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia, AT, VII, 9 (“I yet apprehend that they cannot be adequately understood by many, both because they are also a little lengthy and dependent the one on the other, and principally because they demand a mind wholly free of prejudices, and one which can be easily detached from the affairs of the senses.” René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. Stanley Tweyman, Routlegde, New York, 1993, p. 36, translated by Elisabeth S Haldane and G.R.T Ross).

[2] Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique portatif. Nouvelle edition. Avec des notes; beaucoup plus correcte & plus ample que les précédentes, vol. 2, Amsterdam, chez Varberg, 1765, p. 216: “Prejudice is an opinion without judgment. Thus all over the world do people inspire children with all the opinions they desire, before the children can judge.” Voltaire, The Philosophical Dictionary, Selected and Translated by H.I. Woolf, Knopf, New York, 1924.

[3] Ibidem. “they are those which are ratified by judgment when one reasons.” Ibidem.

[9] Ibidem, p. 250; “In order to get morals has ascendancy over human beings, it is necessary to enlighten them on their true interests; in order to make them enlightened, it is necessary that the truth can educate them, for educate them, it is necessary that prejudice is disarmed by reason, then, the nations, free from the childhood that their tutors strive to make eternal, will engage themselves to reform their institutions, to fight against the abuse of legislation, the false ideas that inspire education, the harmful practices of which they suffer at every moment.”(my own translation)

[27] E.II, prop.XL, sch.1, G.II, p.107. “For instance, those who have most often regarded with admiration the stature of man, will by the name of man understand an animal of erect stature; those who have been accustomed to regard some other attribute, will form a different general image of man, for instance, that man is a laughing animal, a two-footed animal without feathers, a rational animal, and thus, in other cases, everyone will form general images of things according to the habit of his body.” Elswer, p. 122.

[28] Ibidem, “from the thought of the word pomum (an apple), a Roman would straightway arrive at the thought of the fruit apple, which has no similitude with the articulate sound in question, nor anything in common with it, except that the body of the man has often been affected by these two things; that is, that the man has often heard the word pomum, while he was looking at the fruit; similarly every man will go on from one thought to another, according as his habit has ordered the images of things in his body.” Ibidem

[29] E.II, prop. XVIII, sch.G.II, p. 63 “For a soldier, for instance, when he sees the tracks of a horse in sand, will at once pass from the thought of a horse to the thought of a horseman, and thence to the thought of war, &c.; while a countryman will proceed from the thought of a horse to the thought of a plough, a field, &c. Thus every man will follow this or that train of thought, according as he has been in the habit of conjoining and associating the mental images of things in this or that manner.” Elwes, p.102.

[33] CM, I,VI. G.I. p. 246: “later philosophers made use of this signification to denote the agreement or disagreement of an idea with his object” in Spinoza Principles of Cartesian Philosophy: with Metaphysical Thoughts , transl. by Samuel Shirley, ed by S. Barbone and L.Rice, Hackett publishing C.Indianapolis/Cambridge, 1998, p. 107.

[42] E.III, aff. Def.20, expl. “I am aware that these terms are employed in senses somewhat different from those usually assigned. But my purpose is to explain, not the meaning of words, but the nature of things. I therefore make use of such terms, as may convey my meaning without any violent departure from their ordinary signification. One statement of my method will suffice.” Trans. Elwes, p. 235.

[44] TI.G.II, p. 9, “To speak in a manner intelligible to the multitude, and to comply with every general custom that does not hinder the attainment of our purpose. (17:3) For we can gain from the multitude no small advantages, provided that we strive to accommodate ourselves to its understanding as far as possible: moreover, we shall in this way gain a friendly audience for the reception of the truth.” Transl. by Elwes.

In “Libraries and Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Norway and the Outer World,” Gina Dahl offers a marvelous insight into the intellectual life of Eighteenth-Century Norway by looking at library collections in Norway. This is a clever and engaging way to understand and analyze intellectual aspects of the Enlightenment.

Within Western democracies there exists a well-established agreement on the importance of a free press, which figures prominently in their constitutions since the nineteenth century. However, disagreement emerged as soon as the limits of this freedom had to be defined. As much as everyone agreed on the necessity of having limits, there seemed to be no accord on where these limits should be. The history of freedom of the press is a history of the debates on the limits and borders of a free press.[1]

There is no “original meaning of freedom of the press,”[2] a formula which is often used in order to give weight to an argument. Our modern understanding of freedom of the press is the result of different historic developments and philosophical ideas from the nineteenth century, which explain the different limits for a free press in the twenty-first century.

In the western world, the two main reasons for limiting freedom of the press are defending state interests and/or personal rights. There is a stronger emphasis in the Anglo-American world towards limiting the free press for reasons of state security than in the Federal Republic of Germany and vice versa when personal rights where are involved. In the first decades after the war, these differences did not play an important role as long the Cold War had a unifying impact on western societies, but with the end of the Cold War differences became apparent. The different perceptions on the limits of a free press were the result of two arguments used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for justifying a free press combined with a different historical context. By tracing the debate in the English-speaking world and in Germany, these two different arguments will become visible.

In 1644 the debate for freedom of expression started in modern times thanks to John Milton’s Areopagitica, where he still argued about God in order to justify his quest for freedom. With the enlightenment God lost his unifying role for society and could no longer serve as justification. Two arguments were brought then forward to justify freedom of the press: One by the continental movement of the enlightenment; the other from within the movement of utilitarianism, and most influentially by John Stuart Mill. Both underlined the importance of truth; however, they differed in their understanding on what truth was good for. This difference in their arguments had a lasting impact on the debate of the limits of freedom of the press.

Freedom of speech and its limits

Formally the argument for free speech or free press[3] has been the same since John Milton’s time. Freedom was seen as a necessary means of realizing an aim for which wide social acceptance existed. Milton needed to justify his quest for freedom of expression with an argument understandable to his contemporaries and for a man of the seventeenth century only God provided the basis for this argument. It was Milton´s challenge to connect freedom of expression to God. He did it in two ways. Firstly, in a purely rhetorical way, he linked censorship to the Catholic Church, reminding his reader that it was their invention and therefore unworthy of a country such as England.[4] This argument sounded convincing in a society where he could be sure that the Catholic Church was seen as an enemy. In his second more sophisticated argument, he linked truth to God: “Truth is strong, next to the Almighty”[5] and argued that it is our duty to God to seek truth.[6]

A large part of his argument was dedicated to demonstrating that freedom of expression was necessary to searching for truth. The role of freedom as a means for reaching a higher aim became evident when he set its limits. Freedom, he pointed out, was not intended for “popery, and open superstition”[7]. In other words, as the Catholic Church could not, for Milton, contribute towards truth-finding, they had no right to publicity. For him, the Catholic Church, described as the most “anti-Christian”[8] institution, was by definition excluded from enjoying any freedom of expression.

More broadly, however, Milton outlined with this text the construction of the argument for a free press. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century the argument was the same; only God needed to be replaced with something else.

The English way

When Milton wrote Areopagitica, the newspaper had just been invented and it was not so much the journalist – a profession which did not exist in his time – whose freedom he had in mind, but more the righteous intellectual like himself. It was only in the nineteenth century that the newspaper became mass media and the debate on freedom of expression was led under the headline of freedom of the press. The newspaper could hardly be linked to the promotion of God’s truth and, due to the enlightenment, God as an ultimate justification could no more be taken for granted. The argument that Milton had brought forward needed therefore to be adapted to the changing times.

James Mill is a good example on how to do so, by replacing God with the social goals of utilitarianism. As a good friend of Jeremy Bentham, he believed utilitarianism would provide the ultimate fundament for society. In his 1823 essay Liberty of the Press he appealed first of all to common sense, such that everyone must be convinced that a society based on moral principles would achieve the highest happiness for all, which is the crucial criterion of utilitarian ethics. He needed to emphasize this since, unlike Milton, he had to justify the aim that he was striving for, whereas Milton, as a religious man of his time, was able to take God for granted.

However, just like Milton, he had to connect freedom of the press to the best possible society:

We may then ask, if there are any possible means by which the people can make a good choice, besides the liberty of the press? The very foundation of a good choice is knowledge. The fuller and more perfect the knowledge, the better the chance, where all sinister interest is absent, of a good choice. How can the people receive the most perfect knowledge relative to the characters of those who present themselves to their choice, but by information conveyed freely, and without reserve, from one to another? There is another use of the freedom of the press, no less deserving the most profound attention, that of making known the conduct of the individuals who have been chosen. This latter service is of so much importance, that upon it the whole value of the former depends.[9]

James Mill – like Milton before him – saw a link between knowledge and freedom. The results of the last Pisa survey seemed not to suggest this, though. The difference vis-à-vis Milton consists in knowledge no longer serving God but allowing the creation of the ideal society.[10] An ideal society being for him a moral society and the freedom of the press promoting morality, since the individual would be scared that his sinful ways could be exposed to the public[11]:

Everybody believes and proclaims, that the universal practice of the moral virtues would ensure the highest measure of human happiness; no one doubts that the misery which, to so deplorable a degree, overspreads the globe, while men injure men, and instead of helping and benefiting, supplant, defraud, mislead, pillage, and oppress, one another, would thus be nearly exterminated, and something better than the dreams of the golden age would be realized upon earth. Toward the attainment of this most desirable state of things, nothing in the world is capable of contributing so much as the full exercise of truth upon all immoral actions.[12]

In his argument he could no longer refer to religious authority; he had to refer instead to the intellectual authorities of his time in order to strengthen his position.[13] Like Milton, the aim he strived for defined the limits of the freedom:

It will be said, however, that though all opinions may be delivered, and the grounds of them stated, it must be done in calm and gentle language. Vehement expressions, all words and phrases calculated to inflame, may justly be regarded as indecent, because they have a tendency rather to pervert than rectify the judgment.[14]

His argument sounds in the twenty-first century rather weak since it might provide reason for censorship instead for a free press. Any front-page of the yellow press might fail James Mill’s criteria for decency.

It was left to his son John Stuart Mill to provide the argument with the biggest impact to the debate. Without the moral tone of his father argued for the necessity of a free press in order to create the best possible society. And his text On Liberty provided the printing press with the argument against “stamp duty” and censorship:

If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

The printing press in England got with Mill a moral justification for their business. And they needed it, since the reputation of the journalist in the beginning of the nineteenth century was rather low seen as a “greedy adventurer”. With Mill they could claim an important social role in the society. By promoting the idea that the media was the fourth estate, a watchdog for the public interest and a speaker of public opinion a remarkable change occurred in the nineteenth century in England – the once distrusted media became an important and recognized player in society. Of course Mill himself was interested in it, since he saw the media also as a tool to promote his ideas as George Boyce concluded: “Like many political philosophers, the Utilitarians directed their ideas to a practical aim; and not only did they provide the press with an ideology but they also had contacts with the press which enabled them to advance their principles.”[15]

Even when it was obvious that the development and use of the freedom was not conducted in “calm and gentle language” as his father James had thought “the myth of the Forth estate continued to prosper” [16].

The struggle in Germany

The debate in Germany differed for a number of reasons: first of all Utilitarianism was never a strong philosophical or political movement in Germany. Mill wanted to reform English society with his liberal ideas, while Hegel left this to the Weltgeist. Nietzsche made it clear what he thought of a philosophy striving for happiness: “Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does.”[17]

Also early German contributions to the debate of press freedom were emerging from the Romantic Movement, and as in the case of Ludwig Börne, had little practical impact:

Public opinion is not the friend of the established order of the bourgeois society, and that makes the freedom of speech all the more necessary. Public opinion is a lake, which, if you curb him and put stays as long rises until he falls foaming over his place, flooded the land and sweeps everything away by itself. But where he is given an unimpeded run because it breaks up into a thousand streams varied speech and writing, which, peaceful flowing through the land, irrigate and fertilize it . The governments that suppress freedom of speech, because the truths they spread, they are annoying, make it as little children, which shut the eyes to be seen. Fruitless efforts! Where the Living Word is feared, since the death of the troubled soul will not bring peace. The ghost of the murdered thoughts frighten the suspicious prosecutor who slew them, no less than this even done in life. The free flow of public opinion, whose waves are the days writings , is the German Rubicon on which bore the lust for power and might ponder whether they pass him and take the expensive country and the world with him in bloody mess , or whether they themselves to defeat and stick out.[18]

Even if it is beautifully written, the Weltgeist didn’t think Germany ready for it. When social reformers such as Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle, in the middle of the nineteenth century, had finally an impact on society, it was not possible to integrate their ideas into a common struggle for freedom of the press as was the case in England.

In England Mill’s ideas could be integrated and taken up by the media as the Utilitarians provided the press with the arguments needed for claiming their role as the fourth estate. In Germany social reformers positioned themselves in opposition to the press and provided the press with arguments to reject their ideas. Ferdinand Lassalle, one of the founders of the workers’ movement in Germany, claimed: “Our main enemy, the main enemy of the healthy development of the German spirit and the German people, is the press nowadays. (…) Its mendacity, their depravity, their immorality is only outbid by nothing other than perhaps by its ignorance. “[19]

Calling the work of the journalist “prostitution of the spirit”[20] might not have helped improve his standing in the media world. So when Lassalle like Mill called for a free press, the publishing houses were as much on the alert as the government, since he saw not only state interference as a problem, but he questioned also the impact of business interests on freedom of the press: “If someone wants to make money, he may fabricate cotton or cloth or play on the stock market. But that for the sake of filthy gain one is ready to poisoning all the fountains of the spirit of the people and serves the people their spiritual death daily from a thousand tubes – it is the highest crime I can imagine.” [21]

He wished to free the press from advertisements, since he saw in the economic strength of the media an obstacle to its freedom. Lassalle was therefore in line with Karl Marx, who defended freedom of the press in his early writings, underlying that “that the first freedom of the press is not being a business. The writer which degrades it to a material mean deserves as a punishment for this inner lack of freedom also the outer lack of freedom, the censor.”[22] The publisher of the nineteenth century who turned printing into an enterprise could not have taken Börne, Marx or Lassalle on board in their struggle for a free press.

Kant’s heritage

There is however one German philosopher who has had a lasting impact on the debate and on the perception of freedom of the press in Germany: Immanuel Kant. Kant’s argument differs fundamentally from John Stuart Mill’s. Mill is interested in negative freedom, which means absence of regulation to ensure the best possible society; while Kant’s concern is positive freedom,[23] having an enlightened individual able to accept laws made through rational choice. Therefore Kant called for the Enlightenment so that “Man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity” could occur[24]. For Kant this immaturity kept man unfree. In order to achieve enlightenment, Kant asked for the free use of reason: “And the freedom in question is the most innocuous form of all freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters.”[25] However, Kant’s practical suggestion to allow “public use of one’s reason” is a means; the liberated self is the aim. The debate in the Mittwochsgesellschaft– one of the most important German societies in the eighteenth century that promoted enlightenment – showed this when one of the members concluded: “I believe completely unlimited press freedom would surely be misused, most by the unenlightened, and it cannot therefore be a means of enlightenment.”[26] The members of the society wanted to promote enlightenment and the debate about freedom of the press centered on the question of the extent to which freedom of press might be a means to achieve it.

When, after the first World War, the Weimar republic created its first democratic constitution, freedom of the press was included; however, as Jürgen Wilke remarked: “In this respect, one can say that although the idea of freedom of expression as a human right entered the Weimar Constitution, but not its traditional utilitarian justification.”[27]

After the Second World War and its dramatic experiences, the Kantian categorical imperative to treat man “never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end” did materialize by having the “dignity of man” as the first article of the German Basic Law. In a study by Katja Stamm concerning the judgments of the highest courts in Germany, she pointed out that of course press freedom was recognized as a necessity for a functional democratic society, but it also emphasized this Kantian heritage in seeing the value “freedom of expression for the individual development of the personality.”[28]

There is the explanation for German judges limiting freedom of the press when it threatened dignity e.g. as in the case of hate-speech, while for example in the English-speaking world David Irving with his denying of the Holocaust was described as a “free speech martyr”.[29]

It also explains the different reactions to the latest National Security Agencies revelations. Living in a Benthamite panopticum might be safe and happy and, as the British tabloid journalist Paul McMullan expressed it, “Privacy is for peados,”[30] but it signals equally the end of the Kantian autonomous individual.

Conclusion

The discussion of free press in the English-speaking world is about the correct interpretation of John Stuart Mill. In the recently published Free speech. A very short introduction, by Oxford University Press, Mill figures prominently and his ideas are getting a whole chapter in it, while Kant is never mentioned. Contrary to a recently published Eine Ideengeschichte der Freiheit, where Mill is mentioned 23 times, compared to Kant’s 457.

The Kantian link between negative freedom as one’s use of reason in public to the idea of the autonomous individual, which is always an end to itself and cannot be a just a means for a utilitarian better society, allows German journalists and editors to have a self-regulation in place where they underline this Kantian idea of “preservation of human dignity”. The first article of the German journalist code of ethics reads therefore: “Respect for the truth, preservation of human dignity and accurate informing of the public are the overriding principles of the press.”[31]

In the US, the Hutchins Commission concluded already in 1947 that “Freedom of the press for the coming period can only continue as an accountable freedom. Its moral right will be conditioned on its acceptance of this accountability. Its legal right will stand unaltered as its moral duty is performed.”[32] However, instead of following the findings of the commission, twenty years later freedom of expression was the winning argument for Larry Flint in the legal battle for publications of pornography.

State security, however, seemed to be to a much wider extent an acceptable reason for interfering with press freedom in Britain than in Germany. In 2007 the prosecutors dropped all charges against 17 journalists in Germany for disclosing state secrets, while in England in the same year David Keogh and Leo O’Connor were “jailed under the Official Secret Act 1989 for leaking a secret memo detailing discussions between Tony Blair and George Bush in August 2004 about an alleged American proposal to bomb the Arabic television channel al-Jazeere.”[33]

The differences between the German- and the English-speaking will increase as freedom versus security and privacy continue to be seen under either a Kantian or Millian view.

[3] I do not distinguish in this paper between freedom of press and freedom of expression as it is not valid for the argument made in this paper.

[4] After which time the Popes of Rome, engrossing what they pleased of political rule into their own hands, extended their dominion over men’s eyes, as they had before over their judgments, burning and prohibiting to be read what they fancied not;(…) And thus ye have the inventors and the original of book-licensing ripped up and drawn as lineally as any pedigree. We have it not, that can be heard of, from any ancient state, or polity or church; nor by any statute left us by our ancestors elder or later; nor from the modern custom of any reformed city or church abroad, but from the most anti-christian council and the most tyrannous inquisition that ever inquired. John Milton. Areopagitica, The Harvard Classics. http://www.bartleby.com/3/3/3.html last visited 25 April 2014.

[5] Milton. Areopagitica.

[6] “Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on: but when he ascended, and his Apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes of the Egyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb, still as they could find them. We have not yet found them all, Lords and Commons, nor ever shall do, till her Master’s second coming; he shall bring together every joint and member, and shall mould them into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection. Suffer not these licensing prohibitions to stand at every place of opportunity, forbidding and disturbing them that continue seeking, that continue to do our obsequies to the torn body of our martyred saint.” Milton, Areopagitica.

[7] “Yet if all cannot be of one mind–as who looks they should be?–this doubtless is more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian, that many be tolerated, rather than all compelled. I mean not tolerated popery, and open superstition, which, as it extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate, provided first that all charitable and compassionate means be used to win and regain the weak and the misled: that also which is impious or evil absolutely either against faith or manners no law can possibly permit, that intends not to unlaw itself:” Milton, Areopagitica.

[15] “W.T. Stead, (…): A newspaperman must have good copy, and a good copy was ‘oftener to be found among the outcast and the disinherited of the earth than among the fat and well fed citizens.’ Hence, ‘selfishness makes the editor more concerned about the vagabond, the landless man, and the deserted child. (…) It was, for example the sensationalism of the ‘Bitter cry of outcast London’, (…) that led to the appointment of a Royal Commission on the Housing of the poor.”George Boyce, The Fourth Estate: the reappraisal of a concept, in: Newspaper History from the 17th century to the present day, edited by George Boyce, Thomas Curan and Pauline Wingate, Constable, 1978

[29] David Irving two pages after dealing with Mill as “from discredited historian to free speech martyr.” Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction. By Nigel Warburton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 36.

The archaeology of Etruria (e.g. the Phoenician elements in the royal tombs of Pisa and the temple of Pyrgi), the Islamic contribution to the Romanesque Art of Pisa and Florence, and the life of Leonardo Fibonacci da Pisa (i.e. the mathematician who introduced Arab numbers in Europe) are only a few notable examples of this long and intense relationship that needs to be better known, both by scholars and by the public at large.

The last main chapter of this long Semitic history of Tuscany is the one related to the Jewish communities of the region. The main Jewish community in Tuscany was that of Livorno, the new harbour-city of Pisa, created by Medici dynasty as the new commercial hub of Tuscany and one of the main commercial centres of the Mediterranean region. Livorno, once called simply “Porto Pisano” was from the very beginning of its history declared porto franco and put under the protection of the Tuscan Navy of the Military Order of Saint Stephen, which had its monastic and educational buildings in Pisa, but its arsenal and fortress in Livorno. Together with its mother-city Pisa, the site of the Tuscan University and of the Royal Palace, Livorno, which was well-linked to Pisa by a large network of canals, was a kind of second capital of Tuscany, after Florence.

In Livorno, Tuscany offered full protection from any interference to everybody ready to participate in the economic life and growth of the country. Religious freedom was guaranteed to everybody and even the Papal Inquisition could not enter the city. The interaction between Tuscan culture and the minority cultures in Livorno produced very interesting fruits, both in demotic and educated cultural forms. Studies like those conducted by Fabrizio Franceschini on the linguistic and literary landscape of Livorno during the 18th and 19th centuries have proved it clearly.

Today, after the end of the porto franco, the devastation of the second world war and the damnatio memoriae enacted by the Italian Kingdom as well as by Fascist and Republican industrialism and urbanization, visitors have no easy task finding the remains of the long and glorious past of Livorno. But with a good guide and a boat, you can find in the network of canals the still-standing monuments of the “Venice of Tuscany”: the Jews’ ghetto, the Protestant churchyard, the Dutch docks, the Armenian and Greek-Orthodox church, the Greek-Catholic church and the Church of the Corsican Nation.

If you are not going to visit Livorno in near future, then the book by Francesca Bregoli, assistant professor at the Queens College of the City University in New York, is a valid alternative that offers you an impressive experience of Livorno’s past. The book brings you to know the life of Livorno’s Jewish community during the 18th century, at the time when many Jewish intellectuals participated actively in the economic, cultural and scientific life of the Tuscan nation. Despite the scholarly character of the book, meant to clarify how Jewish minorities related to non-Jewish cultural traditions in 18th-century Mediterranean regions, the book is very enjoyable even to a reader that is not specialized in Jewish studies.

Combining the analysis of economic data, judicial and governmental documents with cultural analyses of the nazione ebrea of Livorno, the book covers the development of Jews cultural institutions in Livorno during the period going from the final two decades of Medicean rule over Tuscany to the departure of Grand Duke Leopold I for Vienna in 1790. The first four chapters trace the participation of the Jewish community, protected by the Tuscan rulers, in Tuscan culture, its awareness of Enlightenment thought, and the related scientific reformist aspirations. These first chapters show also how Tuscan Galilean culture helped local intellectuals, including the nazione ebrea, to adopt Enlightenment culture. Particular focus is cast upon Joseph Attias, Angelo de Soria, Joseph Vita Castelli, Graziadio Bondì, and how attendance of studies at the University of Pisa strengthened the ties between Jewish intelligentsia and the Tuscan State.

Chapter Five is dedicated to Tuscan Enlightenment reformism, which was appreciated and studied all over Europe at that time, and it shows how changes in Tuscan public health did not diminish the spiritual concerns of benevolent confraternities. The three final chapters concentrate on Jewish reactions to Tuscan reformist efforts that had important consequences on the economic and political life of the nazione ebrea. In particular, chapter Six explores 18th-century Jewish and Tuscan governmental attempts to regulate social behavior by focusing on Jewish coffeehouses and the laws on gambling within those premises. The chapter shows, for example, that in the sphere of leisure time, developments in the nazione ebrea paralleled and mirrored reformist endeavours championed by the Tuscan authorities at large. Chapter Seven is dedicated to the study of Leopold I’s reforms on the cultural life of the nazione ebrea, especially on Livornese Hebrew printing activity.

The final chapter takes a comparative look at the processes of Jewish inclusion in the 1780s, suggesting the need to look at the Tuscan example in a different way from that used to explain better-known cases of continental Western Europe and in already studied “port Jews” cases. Among the most interesting conclusions of the study we can mention the fact that commercial utility justifying the many rights of the Livornese Jewish community bolstered its corporatist understanding and hindered the political emancipation of its individual members.

The book is without doubt an important contribution to the knowledge of Tuscan history and it also demonstrates the importance of studying Tuscany as a separate cultural and institutional reality, therefore inviting to be cautious vis-à-vis applying to Tuscany what has been concluded about other parts of 18th-century Italy and Europe.

At the end of the 20th century the modern project has become untrustworthy! Or rather: the possibility of finding or creating a pure, rational and ahistorical foundation for science as well as ethics, and the idea that such a foundation will of necessity lead to human emancipation has been called into doubt. The possibility of this doubt must be seen in the light of the horrors that occurred in the heart of enlightened Europe throughout the 20th century, but it must also be understood in relation to the history of the philosophical critique of objectivity and metaphysics. Today we find it impossible to believe in the modern project. We cannot believe in a linear historicity, in objective truth, in the idea that the rationalization of society and technological advances necessarily will lead to the good society. In the slipstream of the dismissal of the modern project, post-modern philosophy has focused on the particular and the singular instead of the general and the universal. In post-modernity, universality and objectivity have been replaced by pluralism and differing perspectives.

Nevertheless, the post-modern belief is not unproblematic. It has considerable consequences for the status of ethics and science. Without an ethic provided by either nature, God or reason, how are we to imagine — not to say create — a good society? If truth is not something we can discover, a riddle we can solve in the great book of nature, how are we to understand the role of science? On the basis of these problems pluralistic thinking is, in the perspective of some, equivalent to a total annihilation of values as such.

Thus, on the one hand, we would like to avoid the metaphysics of the enlightenment, which claims to have a conditionless insight into the true state of the world. This way of thought has ‘proven to be’ untrustworthy on the political and practical level as a result of the unredeemed promises of progress, as well as on the epistemological level because the objective perception of science ‘turned out to be’ only one perspective among others, which aims to achieve something with the world that is made the subject of inquiry. On the other hand, we strive to avoid the negative nihilism: a metaphysics that insists on the inherent insolvability of the obstacles, that all values are relative and therefore non-committing and indifferent, and can be put into practice as existential angst, loss of identity, cosmic absurdity and alienation. It is between these two extremes, the veritable Scylla and Charybdis of philosophy, that different post-modern philosophical projects try to navigate. But how can one acknowledge the negative implications of post-modern philosophy if one – in the light of the history of modernity and the modern critique of metaphysics – finds it impossible to return to the universalistic thought of foundations? How is it possible, at the same time, to take the critique of universality and objectivity seriously, and still believe in the value of ethics and science? How is it possible to understand the notions of ethical and scientific thought if one does not have unconditional confidence in rationality? How is it possible to establish a critical perspective without an objective and universal foundation? How can a dismissal of the basis of the modern thought of enlightenment be combined with a defense of the Enlightenment’s political ambitions of human emancipation and radical democracy?

Programme and research question

If one takes the questions above seriously, it becomes clear that one exhaustive and definitive answer is not asked for, but, instead, that a certain degree of pluralism in the process of thought is presupposed. This implies, on the one hand, that one is to remain humble in regards to the status ascribed to the knowledge acquired, and, on the other hand, that one makes a virtue out of necessity: all answers to the great questions will remain provisional and uncertain. There have been innumerable attempts to formulate answers to these types of questions, and just as many attempts to reformulate the questions themselves and to conceptualize the circumstances that serve as the context for their understanding.[1]

Here, however, I wish to investigate only two of these related types of thought: namely social constructivist discourse theory and radical hermeneutics,as these theories are represented respectively in the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and Gianni Vattimo. It may not seem intuitive that these two theoretical formations, which can be regarded as expressions of different kinds of scholarly tradition – political sociology and continental philosophy, respectively – and which are often operationalized in separate research environments, should be obvious subjects for comparison. Nevertheless, I hold that these two theories are, within their respective disciplines, converging in what could be called the sociological turn of philosophy and the philosophical orientation of the sociology of knowledge. Here, my objective is to argue that one can talk about a kinship or an affinity between these two seemingly heterogeneous types of thought, and, furthermore, to illuminate the character of this relationship. In other words, I wish to argue in favor of the claim that these two theoretical formations are engaged with related types of problems, but have conceptualized them differently. They share central insights, but understand these insights with different vocabularies. Furthermore, I wish to undertake a comparative analysis that aims at throwing light upon the different analytical strategies and horizons of understanding the two meta-theories offer / open, in order to discuss how hermeneutics and constructivism could mutually inform and enrich each other or benefit from each others’ insights, when it comes to the question of human emancipation and radical democracy.

Research question:

What kinship can be described between Laclau & Mouffe’s discourse theory and Vattimo’s hermeneutics, and how can this relation contribute to a rethinking of the question of human emancipation and radical democracy?

The structure of the article

This article is structured in the following way: the first two chapters consist respectively of readings and presentations of Vattimo’s weak thought and Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. I have attempted to focus on how each of these authors present their theory’s’ ‘antecedent’ or background (that is, what and whom they write in continuation of and in opposition to), how they formulate their central problems, and, furthermore, how they formulate, introduce, legitimate and reflect upon their own ‘meta-perspectives’. I have also attempted to explain important notions and key concepts, as they appear. In the third chapter, I have undertaken an analytical comparison of the two theories. This comparison focuses on the (anti-)foundations inherent to the two positions on theory of science, and their implications for which types of analysis and narratives that are made possible by the employment of their different categories. Furthermore I discuss the status and role of science, social critique and ethics as they appear in the light of the two theories. In the fourth chapter, I will discuss the relationship between emancipation and truth, using discourse theory and weak thought as points of reference.

1. The weak thought

How is it possible to understand ethics, justice and emancipation if one accepts that no final foundation of thought is ever given? This is the question that Gianni Vattimo raises and attempts to answer with “The Weak Thinking”(Vattimo, 2005a, p. 53-55; Nielsen, 2005a, p. 9). According to Vattimo, this question becomes meaningful when one accepts nihilism as part of today’s human and philosophical conditions (Vattimo, 1997, p. 5). This acceptance is to be understood in light of Vattimo’s syncretic interlacing of Nietzsche’s perspectivist teachings of interpretation with Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics and positing of the hermeneutic turn in phenomenology (Nielsen, 2005a, p. 19-20; Nielsen, 2005b, p. 132-133; Rorty, 2004, p. 9).

In regard to hermeneutics, Vattimo takes as a point of departure the existential analytics from the first part of Martin Heidegger’s magnum opus Being and Time, in which human being as Dasein is explored and conceptualized. One of the central points here is that being human is always-already being in the world (with others) and, thus, always-already being engaged in the practice of understanding and interpreting. Humanity is, in other words, embedded in concrete relations of sense and meaning, in such a way that prejudice precedes perception. This means that human beings are interested subjects rather than neutral observers. Thus, in this perspective, knowledge is always interpretation (Vattimo, 2005b, p. 44; Heidegger, 2007, p. 79 § 12, p. 171 § 31 & p. 177ff § 32).

Similarly, Vattimo’s starting point with regards to Nietzsche is the part of the latter’s teachings of interpretation that roughly reject all of the western philosophical tradition’s aspirations to obtain a pure and objective, universal and ahistorical cognition of the true structure of the world. This aspiration presupposes a distinction between the immediate experienced phenomena and the intrinsic nature of the world.[2] In this context, Nietzsche’s famous statements that “God is dead” and “the true world finally became a fable”[3], come to express two things: first, that nothing is given and absolute truth thus must yield in favour of different historically situated, reality constituting interpretations; and, second, a repudiation of every metaphysical position claiming an unconditional insight into the unconditional foundation of knowledge. The God, whose death certificate Nietzsche signs, is thus not solely a reference to the Christian God whose historically privileged position as the indubitable Archimedean point were challenged and undermined in the age of Nietzsche, but is instead to be understood as a metaphor for all metaphysical axiomatic final grounds (i.e. reason, reality, humanity, nature, etc.).

The point of departure that Vattimo inherits from both Heidegger and Nietzsche is – in the words of the latter[4] – that there are no facts, only interpretations. The philosophical project of Vattimo thus starts where the central insight of hermeneutics, that knowledge is a historico-cultural interpretation, has been accepted, and continues as Vattimo uses hermeneutics to question the status of hermeneutics itself: if one accepts that everything is interpretation, this must necessarily be an interpretation as well. In other words, the claim that hermeneutics should be more valid or more truthful than other philosophical or epistemological positions cannot be maintained on the basis of hermeneutics itself. According to Vattimo, this means that the hermeneutical critique of metaphysics, which states that no ahistorical and objective foundations of knowledge exists, does not match up to its own standards and thus does not vanquish but instead reinstitutes metaphysics (Vattimo, 2005a, p. 241; Vattimo, 2005b, p. 43ff). Against this backdrop (that not even the absence of a foundation can constitute a foundation for thinking), Vattimo investigates the possibilities of an emancipatory and non-totalitarian nihilistic philosophy.

Strong thinking

Central to Vattimo’s project is a distinction between what he terms strongand weak thinking, which, as I will discuss later, plays a key role in his critique of culture and ethico-political enterprise. Strong thinking is a generic term referring to the kind of thinking which implicitly or explicitly claims to be based upon universal and ahistorical facts, and thus claims to hold a privileged and true understanding of fundamental and objective conditions. Strong thinking is synonymous with metaphysically based thinking, in a sense where metaphysics – in the words of Vattimo – is defined as the ultimate foundation ”for which no conditions can be adduced that in turn found it; if it has no conditions, it is unconditioned, it can only present itself as an absolute truth” (Vattimo, 2004, p. 38). To this category belong those variants of post-modern philosophy that insist that no foundation of ethics or knowledge exists, because this implicitly is a statement of unconditional insight into the true structure of reality (Vattimo, 2005a, p. 57, 96).The weak thinking is the kind of thinking which does not claim to be an expression of absolute truth and therefore permits a plurality of interpretations of the world. The two types of strong thinking – modern thinking and the negative nihilism, respectively – are among the objects of Vattimo’s criticism.

Vattimo’s critique of culture is thus, on the one hand, aimed at the strong thinking, which since the beginning of modernity has been characterized by a linear and progressive conception of history, where the western world has been perceived as the culmination of the evolution of humanity. That is, Vattimo does not believe in progress or enlightenment in the sense of a linear process, where the rationalization and the accumulation of truth (i.e. scientific and technological advances) lead to or are independently to be considered human progress. On the contrary, modern rationality has – in the perspective of Vattimo – historically proven to result in a suspension of the subject it was brought about to serve. In the same manner, it has been exactly the strong certainty of an elevated insight in universal and objective values that has legitimized the fact that the West has “felt itself called upon to civilize, as well as colonize, convert, and subdue, all the other peoples with whom it came in contact” (Vattimo, 2004, p. 21; Vattimo, 2005a, p. 72ff, 138). In Vattimo’s version of the history of modernity, which is inextricably linked to his critique of culture, it is modern history which has made a radical doubt in the necessary connection between enlightenment and human emancipation possible, and thus created the conditions of possibility for a post-modern philosophy which refuses the existence of universal and ahistorical first principles (Vattimo, 2005a, p. 99ff, 108-109). It is, however, of crucial importance to Vattimo that the historical attempts to establish a non-metaphysical thinking does not end in what he calls “negative nihilism”; that is, a perspective where nothing can be said to have any value. More specifically, negative nihilism draws the conclusion from the death of God – i.e. from the absence of a universal meta-ethical criterion, in reference to which a true ethics can be derived – that all valuation and all normativity is of arbitrary character, and that, therefore, all justifications in principle refer to nothing or are based on random assertions, the negations of which could have an equal claim to truth. Nevertheless, Vattimo insists that nihilism will undermine itself if it is thought through.

Weak thinking

With the weak thinking, Vattimo attempts to walk the thin line between the extremes described above: blinkered fundamentalism and negative nihilism. Weak thinking means, in broad outlines, to accept that “with the end of metaphysics we are not attaining a truer vision of reality – that would be metaphysics” (Vattimo, 2004, p. 32).Or, in other words, it means to acknowledge that metaphysics can never be overcome in a manner that does not imply a simultaneous reinstallation of a new metaphysics. According to Vattimo, one must instead accept that our understandings always are historico-culturally tied interpretations, and that hermeneutics itself is an interpretation, and thus cannot be made a universal foundation. On this view, we will never get rid of our historical baggage and must therefore endure and come to terms with our metaphysical heritage, our culture and history, on the background of which our understanding is based, and, at the same time, become conscious that these could have been different and that even this difference could have been otherwise[5](Vattimo, 2005a, p. 95, 98). In light of both the radical absence of a certain foundation of knowledge and ethics, and in light of the indispensability of both, Vattimo points towards what he terms “faith”. Faith or “belief” can be understood as a weak parallel to unconditional insight in the sense that it enables one to put forward an understanding of the world, without simultaneously implying that it could not be otherwise. Faith is to choose to regard as truth, or not being able not to believe in, while knowing that one cannot chose freely, but is somehow bound to one’s historical and cultural heritage (Vattimo, 2005a, p. 101ff). Thus, in Vattimo’s view, the answer to the opening question – “How is it possible to understand ethics and emancipation after the death of God?” – is: on the basis of faith. Furthermore, in the eyes of Vattimo, faith points back towards humanity and the immanent potentiality of putting value into the world by oneself, which is synonymous with the positive nihilism, the ‘superman’ and the conditions for the possibility of emancipation (Vattimo, 2005a, p. 111-113).In the case of Vattimo himself, he is managing heritage from Roman Catholic Christianity, Marxist Communism and Philosophical Hermeneutics (Nielsen, 2005, p. 10; Vattimo, 1999; Vattimo & Zabala, 2011). The weakening of thinking nevertheless means that the task of philosophy – as historicity is taken seriously and the project of uncovering the eternal truth is called off – becomes that of being occupied with the finite and particular, the transitory and perishable. The validity of philosophical answers must thus be evaluated by those who ask the questions, and must – when it comes to their status – also be considered as provisional and temporary, as every new generation must formulate and answer the questions of particular relevance to their respective era (Vattimo, 2005a, p. 65ff; Nielsen, 2005a, p. 19).

2. Discourse theory

The theoretical work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe is an attempt to reopen an analytical as well as emancipatory perspective, in a world where the distance between the teleological Marxist teachings regarding the end of history and the actual historical developments of modernity seems to be growing greater and greater; that is, where the belief that the societal contradictions through class struggle with historical necessity will lead to the realization of the utopia of the classless communist society is increasingly difficult to sustain (Boucher, 2008, p. 1-4; Clausen et al., 2002, p. 15-19; Laclau & Mouffe, 2001, 149-193). More specifically, Laclau and Mouffe wish to break with all theoretical frames of explanation that operate with logics of necessity or determination, and instead to develop an apparatus of concepts which enables them to frame matters of political opposition and social transformation in terms of contingency (Clausen et al., 2002, p. 15; Mouffe, 1997a, p. 22-23). Contingency here refers to something that could have been different and that makes the specific historical structuring in itself the pivotal point of the (meta-)political struggle(s) (Laclau & Mouffe, 2002, p. 19ff). These efforts are carried out as a social constructivist discourse theory.

In the early phases of the development of this theory, Laclau and Mouffe draw on the Marxist legacies of both Antonio Gramsci and Louis Pierre Althusser, while also – implicitly and explicitly – trying to cut their ties to this legacy (Boucher, 2008, p. 7ff; Butler et al., 2000, p. 2). Both Gramsci and Althusser are, in the eyes of Laclau and Mouffe, favourable due to fact that both of them refuse the variants of the Marxist cosmology in which the economic conditions are omni-determining and where the superstructure is therefore reduced to a function of the material basis, or is perceived of as a detached and random epiphenomenon with no actual influence on the end of history (Boucher, 2008, p. 7-22). Nevertheless neither Gramsci nor Althusser are, according to Laclau and Mouffe, radical enough in their break with the model of structure/superstructure, inasmuch as they only attribute the phenomena of the superstructure a relative autonomy (Mouffe, 1997b, Mouffe, 1997c). In contrast to Gramsci and Althusser, the theoretical perspective of Laclau and Mouffe contains a break with the model of structure /superstructure, including in particular a break with the distinction between economy and ideology, which they describe as having an ideological character itself. Discourse theory can thus be understood as a continuation of the Marxist critique of ideology, but with the crucial difference that Vladimir Lenin’s theory of reflection[6] – that is, the conception that the objective of scientific socialism’s critique of ideology is the dissolving of false consciousness and the establishment of a 1:1 correspondence between the objective reality and the scientific knowledge – are rejected qua rejection of an extra-ideological objective base (Laclau & Mouffe, 1997, p. 21ff, 33ff).

This rejection, however, implies a break with the simple notion of class as an ontological category and the idea of the classes’ objective interests and conflicts of interests, in favour of a perception that emphasizes the historical construction of political subjects and the impossibility of a notion of interests detached from the constituted subjectivities (Laclau & Mouffe, 2002, p. 15ff). The field of inquiry of discourse theory is, in contrast, the endeavours for hegemony; that is, the struggle to construct specific forms of subjectivity and to constitute reality in a certain way, and the consequences of this for social practices.

In the late phases of the development of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory, the Marxist vocabulary is, to a large extent, substituted by an apparatus of concepts that revolves around the concept of discourse from Michel Foucault’s theories of the dispositiveand the knowledge/power-relation. At the same time, they incorporate concepts and perspectives from Jacques Derrida’s deconstructivismand Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis into their theory (Laclau & Mouffe, 2002, p. 15, 21; Butler et. al., 2000, p. 2-3). In simple terms, the most important insight Lacalu and Mouffe adopt from Foucault is the idea that the description of the world is neither objective nor neutral, but, on the contrary, is an historical product and has comprehensive normative implications; power is exactly naturalization and neutralization of ‘knowledge’ and the related structuring of the human space for thought and action. Laclau and Mouffe, however, dismiss Foucault’s conception of the existence of anything extra-discursive, on the grounds that a distinction between discursive and non-discursive must itself be of a discursive nature (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001, p. 105-106). The ontological level is – in the theory of Laclau and Mouffe – a pure abstraction, to which they refer as the “discursive field”. As the name indicates, this field consists of pure discourse and is understood as a continuously flowing pulp of meaning(s), a surplus of meaning. The discursive field is not, inasmuch as it is not something. This empty existence only becomes sensible and meaningful being, as a result of the discursive mediation. The discursive mediation is instituted and shaped by the social process of articulation,[7] which connects and modifies elements of the flowing meaning in discourses through the construction and fixation of nodal points. The flowing of meaning is thus restricted and certain meanings are temporarily fixed (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001, p. 113).The processes of articulation therefore (re)construct the social reality: though the incorporation of meaning(s) into discourses – and the incorporation of discourses into discursive formation – all identity is constituted: objects, phenomena, subjects, relations, actions etc. (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001, p. 105, 107; Laclau & Mouffe, 2002, p. 52ff, 64; Torfing, 1999, p. 92; Thomsen, 2007, p. 183-84; Hansen, 2004, p. 392-394).Laclau and Mouffe’s concept of discourse is a broad concept that encompasses three dimensions: a) The verbal representations or concrete articulations – language and its usage, b) the objects, the identity of which the articulation constructs, and, c) the actions, relations and interactions, which, on the one hand, are made possible by a given articulation and, on the other hand, constitute and themselves make up the (re)articulations (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001, p. 105-108; Thomsen, 2007, p. 181-182). One of Laclau and Mouffe’s central points is that every articulation is an implicit exclusion of other possible meanings apart from the one articulated (Hansen, 2004, p. 401-02). The articulative practice – and thereby the discursive mediation of the world – are therefore of decisive importance for the arrangement of the human spaces of thought and action. Put another way, the discursive construction of the world makes possible and normalizes certain forms of social patterns of action and excludes and delegitimizes others. Power is therefore inevitably implied in all discursive practices (Hansen, 2004, p. 401-02). The discourses are, however, not solely a restriction of possible thoughts and actions. They also serve to condition what there is and how it is, and therefore they give – or rather are – the meaning and sense of the social reality in which human beings live together.

Another of the substantial points is that discourses never becomes completely fixed or static, but on the contrary, are continuously dislocated and thus can be made the object of new rearticulations (Hansen, 2004, p. 394-395). No discourse can close itself around itself to a large enough extent that it unambiguously determines how the social reality is constructed and what social practices are made possible (ibid. p. 395). Structural dislocation and principal undesirability differentiate discourse theory from deterministic structuralism, because it operates within a space where change – as a result of decision – is not only possible but required (ibid. p. 395). Discourse theory however does not employ a classical concept of agency. It is not the intentional human individual who makes these decisions (Laclau & Mouffe, 2002, p. 115). The subject in discourse theory is the need to transcend the absence, distance and imperfection in the discourses that the absence, distance and imperfection institute themselves (Laclau, 1990, p. 33 according to Hansen, 2004, p. 396-97).

3. Comparison

In negative terms it is relatively easy to identify a series of ‘essential’ common features of Laclau and Mouffe´s discourse theory and Gianni Vattimo’s weak thought. Both perspectives present themselves as alternatives to or even rejections of essentialist thought. That is, both perspectives deny that phenomena or objects have actual or authentic, intrinsic and contextless substance or meaning, which is the same as saying: there is no objective real world behind or beneath, external to and independent of appearance or understanding that could be represented more or less adequately or that philosophical speculation, scientific method – or for that matter, religious revelation – could recognize, discover or deduce. The concepts of knowledge of both discourse theory and weak thought thus contrast with the correspondence theory of truth, where truth is understood as the establishment of a linguistic 1:1 representation of reality. Instead both theories operate with the idea that the meaning of phenomena is contingent and identity is dependent on the historical and socio-cultural context. The common leitmotif can thus be said to be: where we thought being was, nothing appeared to be. Both positions are in other words – more or less elegant – renunciations of the distinction between ontology/epistemology and the dualism of subject/object. That is, they both, to a large extent, refuse to distinguish between being and human perception. Nevertheless Laclau and Mouffe and Vattimo address the break with these categories very differently.

The approach of Laclau and Mouffe can be explained as ascribing privilege to epistemology, which leads to an emptying of ontology. Their preliminary assumption is, as mentioned, that everything is discursively mediated, that is a product of articulation.[8] In this conception, this means that identity is constituted through verbal ‘putting-into-words’, and that essence / materiality / objectivity are things that are constructed and thus do not refer to – that which is constituted as – an object’s intrinsic nature. Instead, these refer to something which is external to constructed identities. Even though Laclau and Mouffe explicate that nothing exists outside of discourses[9], they nevertheless address the extra-discursive, both implicitly and explicitly, all the same. It is ambiguous, in other words, precisely what status the ontological level has in their theory: on the one hand, they present their foundation as an empty ontology or an ontological absence, only characterized by its non-presence, but nevertheless playing a central (but obscure) role in regard to the articulative practices’ ‘discursivating’ function and the discursive formation’s concrete ‘structurization’[10]. On the other hand, Laclau and Mouffe at times describe the extra-discursive as the field of discursivity, and address it as a regular and bubbling surplus of meaning – a sizzling mire – composing the unrestricted raw material, rendering a (re)articulative formation of specific identity possible through the excluding establishment of dissimilarity with other possible identities.

Vattimo’s mode of breaking with the distinction between object and subject is remarkably different from Laclau and Mouffe’s approach. First, one major difference consists in Vattimo claiming that we are already out with the things, whereas Laclau and Mouffe argue that the objects are constituted linguistically, and therefore are already with us, to the extent that language refers to humans.[11] Secondly, instead of the concept of an empty ontology, Vattimo works with an idea of a weak or weakened ontology. Where the ontological absence with Laclau and Mouffe is presented as a metaphysical fact and – with the vocabulary of Vattimo – as an expression of strong thinking, Vattimo argues that the best one can do is to refrain from insisting upon reaching a final conclusion about the world and to regard the weakening as an ongoing process instead of a condition. Acknowledging that one is always addressing the world and being (linguistically and interpreting), he instead recommends that we come to terms with the always provisional, imperfect and fragile character of our interpretations of the world. The result, however, is close to that of discourses being dislocated by definition, and therefore always only temporary fixations of meaning and sense, but has the character of an ideal more than a description.

In spite of the similarities between Laclau & Mouffe and Vattimo there is a relatively large difference in the implications of their respective theories: with Laclau and Mouffe the contingency and flowing of meaning are presented as an historical condition. In the perspective of Vattimo historicity is historical itself, which has two notable implications. On the one hand, it is possible that being at an historical moment had an objective, universal and ahistorical character, but due to an event – that can only be understood in terms of miraculous creation-from-nothing – retroactively has become historically variable. Vattimo is, in other words, implicitly working with a notion of inverted causality. It is, on the other hand, possible that historicity itself one day will become historical, in the sense of a re-‘essentialization’ of being, which in the terminology of Vattimo is referred to as nihilism’s inherent possibility of a reopening towards being (Vattimo, 2005a, p. 76-78).

The absence of a metaphysical foundation

Both Laclau’s and Mouffe’s discourse theory and Vattimo’s weak thinking investigate the possibilities of establishing a meaningful (post/un-metaphysical) concept of knowledge, in the light of their respective emphasis of the inaccessibility of a universal, ahistorical and cross-cultural foundation for knowledge and cognition. However, where Laclau and Mouffe stop with the recognition that the foundational categories of understanding are contingent and that the conditions of possibility of cognition therefore are always changeable, Vattimo is not satisfied with the conclusion that there is no foundation. From his point of view, not even the absence of a foundation can be considered a certain and firm foundation that can provide the basis for our (lack of) knowledge. Thus, Laclau and Mouffe can be regarded as exponents of a post- / last metaphysic, or the absolute meta-theory, while Vattimo has abandoned the efforts to overcome metaphysics and accepted that weakening or continuing “wervindung”of metaphysics is the closest to non-metaphysical thinking we will get[12].

Central categories: discourse and interpretation

Common to the concepts of discourse and interpretation is the fact that both are all-embracing meta-categories, encompassing all meaning and sense: ‘There is nothing outside of the discourses; everything is interpretation’. There are nevertheless a series of differences in terminology and connotations. A discourse is a product of articulation(s), and therefore it always has a linguistic dimension.[13] Apart from the concrete (non-)verbal expressions, discourses also encompasses both the objects, phenomena, relations etc., the identity of which they constitute, and the frames of human (rearticulative) practices. Even though it might seem that articulation/practice presupposes a subject capable of speech, action and speech-action, the concept of discourse is however over- or extra-subjective, in the sense that it is not directly linked to individuals: the discourse has priority over, precedes and constitutes the subject’s positions, in reference to which speech as well as action is possible. In comparison, Vattimo’s concept of interpretation is way more related to the single individuals, or stated more precisely, to ‘Dasein’ (the being characterized by raising questions towards its own being and – which is the most important in this connection – by definition are in the world with others). Interpretation is thus carried out on an individual level, but presupposes that others are and that mutual understanding, to begin with, is both possible and the case. An interpreting approach to the world is regarded as a feature of the human mode of being[14], which nevertheless could have been otherwise because the historicity – with Vattimo – precedes human interpretation, in such a manner that the descriptions of the human mode of interpretation in themselves are an interpretation, which (only) are possible in a certain historical context[15].

Overall, Vattimo’s terminology is less formalistic and less analytic than Laclau and Mouffe’s elaborations on discourses. Yet another difference consists in the concept of interpretation not focusing on – but neither excluding – linguistic-verbal ascribing of meaning, but to a large extent referring to the process of thinking as the main level of creating meaning. Summarily, it can be said that both discursive mediation and interpretation are categories concerned with historical and particular humans’ relationships to a world, which is not independent from them. The terms also differ from each other, due to the fact that hermeneutics has a conception of the subject that, to a wider extend than discourse theory, is tied to the individual human. There are, however, also subtle indications of the opposite: in statements such as ‘the reality is a social construction’, being is indirectly described or located as a man-made product, while terms and phrases from the vocabulary of hermeneutics such as ‘being drifts its essence’, ‘being happens’ or ‘being vicissitude itself’ can be said to place the shaping of phenomena beyond human influence. It can be argued that, whereas articulation is performed by someone, meaning and sense exist for someone; discourses are something one identifies or (re)constructs, while interpretation is something one carries out.

Common to Vattimo’s and Laclau & Mouffe’s perspectives is the idea that, even though the being of the world is not independent of, but on the contrary intimately connected to human understanding, there are relatively narrow bounds to how the world can be respectively interpreted or articulated meaningfully. With Laclau and Mouffe, the bounds of articulation are referred to as the linguistic structures, and even though the concrete usage of language always modifies the language system as a whole, the question about which discourses win the hegemonic struggles, and therefore constitute the frames and conditions of possibility for rearticulation, is a question of different projects’ relative strengths. With Vattimo, the bounds of which interpretations can be made meaningfully are decided by the historical-cultural heritage, of which there always are different ways to manage; one out-throws one’s thrownness.

Change: ‘The management of heritage’ and ‘the struggle for hegemony’

Development or dynamic – that is, the reconstruction and transformation of reality over time – is, in the theory of Laclau and Mouffe, a result of competing discursive projects’ struggle for hegemony. That being said, two provisions are of importance to the question on the premises for transformation of discourses. First, by virtue of the relational constitution of identity, every modification of a moment in a given discourse will change all other parts of a discourse and is therefore a radical change of the structural whole. Second, as a result of the structural dislocation it is, in the view of Laclau and Mouffe, a formal impossibility that a discourse would close itself upon itself, i.e. becoming final and once and for all constituting the world in one certain way. In other words, dominance, as the term is employed by Foucault, is never possible. This implicates that change as such is a structural inevitability, even though no specific development is a necessary product of intra-discursive logic or dynamics. When something appears, or rather becomes constituted, as an exigency or (logical) necessity, it is the result of one out of several possible decisions having won hegemony at the expense of alternative routes of development. Furthermore, this means that nothing (by nature) is reducible to something else or can be viewed as a random expression of an immutable root principle. In Laclau’s and Mouffe’s elaborations of this, they refer to both the surplus of meaning, as well as to the ontological absence: on the one hand, it seems like the ontological is richer that its symbolization / articulation, and thus partially escape fixation, which is why new articulations always can constitute a new object. On the other hand, it is due to the chronic imperfections, that no ‘discursivation’ can become permanent and unchallenged. When it comes to the question of who – that is, what subjects – there, in the cosmos of discourse theory, is struggling for hegemony, it is easier to answer in negative then in positive terms. It is neither individuals nor collective subjects, as, for example, persons or classes, but, rather, a decentralized subject, a plural swarm, a multitude of motions structured around contingent points of conflict.

In contrast to Laclau and Mouffe, Vattimo does not attempt to sketch out universal rules or conditions for change, but notes that the ‘diversity of interpretations’ and the ‘epochal character of reality’ occur in this historical epoch. Whereas Vattimo address historical development in terms of managing, out-throwing of new projects and opening of new horizons, Laclau and Mouffe address it in terms of struggle or competition and exclusions of alternative constructions of the world. Vattimo operates, as mentioned – to the degree of which he addresses the dynamics of history – within the possibility of a reopening towards being.

Merging of horizons and antagonisms

Whereas the concepts of discourse and interpretation, as shown, share a series of similarities, there is a great difference between how the relations between, respectively, discourse and discourse, and interpretation and interpretation are presented and viewed in discourse theory and hermeneutics. Laclau and Mouffe theorize over the inter-discursive relations in terms of antagonism and equivalence (Laclau & Mouffe, 2002, p. 74-84), while one in hermeneutics often works with a conception of the possibility of the fusion of horizons. We are, in other words, dealing with a conflict and a consensus perspective respectively. A fusion of horizons would, in the perspective of Laclau and Mouffe, be an expression of political hegemony; a situation where a set of particular understandings and interests have been made a common project. In her later works, Mouffe, however, begins to operate with the concept of agonism (a relation of conflict where the positions do not necessarily prevent each other’s realization), in order to have a positive ideal for political / democratic negation (Laclau & Mouffe, 2002, p. 15, 30-31, 185ff). Vattimo, on the other hand, points out that a plurality of perspectives cannot necessarily be equaled with peaceful coexistence, but on the contrary can be the cause of conflicts (Vattimo, 2005a, p. 97).

After truth: politics and ethics

The question of what happens when truth is no longer considered the yardstick for, but rather the product of scientific work, is central to both Vattimo’s and Laclau’s & Mouffe’s work, but is answered differently in the two theories. In the perspective established by Laclau and Mouffe, the focus is on the political implications of the articulation instead of the truth-value of a given discourse. Under the discourse-theoretical perspective, the political is comprised of the structuring and constitution of society (the social), and is thus not a social subsystem or autonomous superstructure. Instead it is that which institutes the social as such (Laclau, 1996, p. 47-48). That is to say, the political is the implication of the way in which the social reality is constructed and especially what forms of practices (actions, thoughts, wills, relations etc,), to begin with, are rendered (im)possible and, on the second pass, (de)legitimized or (de)naturalized. The actual political struggle or negotiation is therefore the question about how interests or wills (and their possible objects) are constituted in the social. It can be argued that Laclau’s and Mouffe’s discourse theory focuses indirectly upon the power struggle over the distribution of resources in the broadest possible sense (that being food, shelter, recognition, education, etc. and everything else that can be perceived of as desirable). Yet with a strict reservation: the question of interests and desire cannot be understood independently of the forms of subjectivity connected to the subject positions as they are constituted and made possible within the frames of a concrete formation of discourses. The standard for evaluation of knowledge is thus not truth, but rather justice. Nevertheless, there is no theoretical and general definition of justice; there is no universal meta-perspective. On the other hand, there is neither any concrete sociality, where particular interests, conflicts and struggles for hegemony between a plurality of possible decisions are not instituted (Laclau1996:48-50). The hermeneutics of Vattimo operate, as described above, not with truth as a criterion for evaluation of the ‘quality’ of different interpretations. Instead it focuses on the question of ethics. The challenge, to make a short summary, to a weak or non-metaphysical thinking of ethics is, that it – as it fully accepts the historicity – cannot lead to the formulation of universal ethical principals or general imperatives (Vattimo, 2005a, p. 101). Instead, one is left with a ‘demand’ to put value into the world oneself, and by oneself to find out how to act in concrete situations. In addition, such a thinking implies a skeptic attitude towards imperatives which ”pretend to present itself a final and universal principle” (Vattimo, 2005a, p. 112-115, own translation) as well as an awareness that not even one’s skepticism towards metaphysical legitimization is universal nor recommendable at all times, because it also builds upon a socio-cultural and historical ideal (Vattimo, 2005a, p. 112-115). The weak thinking is thus putting forward a conception of ethics as an adducing of historic-cultural prejudice. Or said differently: Ethics is a managing of that, which one always-already is. In this perspective,the idea of ‘neutral’ behavior is an absurdity and the scientific ideal of objective or purely descriptive statements about the world is undermined, in favor of an attempt to realize that descriptions always have normative implications. Thinkingalways also shapes and opens a normative space.

4. Freedom after truth

Weak hinking and discourse theory are – as they find expression with, respectively, Vattimo and Laclau & Mouffe – philosophical systems which undermine the basis of the project of Enlightenment, or better, the emancipatory horizon of the modern epoch. If the politico-ethical dimension of the enlightenment is interpreted as an ambition to realize the inner principle of the world, to acquire true and ahistorical knowledge corresponding to the nature of reality and the natural laws governing the material world, and then – when humanity have thrown away the veil of ignorance – hereby have the basis of a rational approach to the world (that is, an approach not being muddled by religious myths, unenlightened superstition and irrational emotions[16]), it becomes overt that the dismissal of the possibility of absolute truth demands a rethinking of the idea of human emancipation: Without an ahistorical anthropology, no rational and scientific social critique; Without a universal moral, no general ethical imperatives; Without context-independent value, no objective justice. That said, both discourse theory and weak thinking agree that what Laclau refers to as ‘the rejection of the myth of foundation’ and Vattimo calls ‘the weakening of the thinking’ or ‘rethinking of being in weak terms’ isnot necessarily synonymous with nihilism in the negative sense of the term (i.e. abolition of value as such and impossibility of political engagement). On the contrary, they argue that the rejection of the Enlightenment’s understanding of history and the concept of knowledge are actually strengthening the political dimensions of the Enlightenment project, and reopen the emancipatory horizons associated therewith. More specifically, they argue that:

A) as totalitarian force is exercised with reference to universal absolutes, the absence of metaphysical first principles could be the ‘foundation’ of a radical and plural democracy, where the discussions cannot be brought forth by referring to the truth, but instead must be influenced by a mutual respect of each other’s perspectives (Vattimo, 2005a, p. 85; Laclau & Mouffe, 2002, p. 112, 120);

B) the dismissal of the belief in the possibility of a final foundation of ethical and political practice gives a consciousness about our values not being matter of course or natural, but rather an expression of decision and faith, and thus requires an ongoing managing and defense.

There are, nevertheless, many obstacles for an attempt to establish a post-metaphysical thinking. If one tries to overcome metaphysics once and for all, one will inevitably come in a situation where “something that should have been thrown overboard, will be smuggled back in”[17]; where the abolition of one metaphysical foundation implicitly reinstalls another. If ‘postmodernism’ should not become the ‘Pharisees’ reappearance in a world without gods’, philosophy must accept never to get rid of metaphysics; never to establish an ultimate meta-perspective. The ambitions are, in other words, not to stop using words such as is or truth, but instead to render it unimportant whether they are said or not. Concretely, discourse theory – as Laclau and Mouffe have contributed to develop it – contributes with analytical tools, which can be operationalized to denaturalize and unontologize contingent phenomena and the related forms of power. However, this unavoidably implies a (re)construction, a new discursive mediation. The new scientific ideal is thus – as Vattimo encourages – to attempt to become conscious about the ethical and political implications of what one is replacing the old with.

”From now on, (…) let us protect ourselves better from the dangerous old conceptual fantasy which posits a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of cognition,” let’s guard ourselves against the tentacles of such contradictory ideas as “pure reason,” “absolute spirituality,” “knowledge in itself”—those things which demand that we imagine an eye which simply can’t be imagined, an eye without any direction at all, in which the active and interpretative forces are supposed to stop or be absent—the very things through which seeing first becomes seeing something. Hence these things always demand from the eye something conceptually empty and absurd. The only seeing we have is seeing from a perspective; the only knowledge we have is knowledge from a perspective” (Nietzsche, 1993, p. 130).

In his attempts to work with the problem of the impossibility of overcoming metaphysics, Vattimo employs Heidegger’s notion of Verwindung as a weak alternative to Überwindung (overcoming) (Vattimo, 2005a, p. 95).

A distinction between discursive and unmediated is, in the view of Laclau and Mouffe, in itself having a discursive character. The distinguishing between the material and the immaterial, idea and reality is likewise in itself a product of a specific discursive mediation. Discourse is thus a meta-category, which according to Laclau and Mouffe cannot be placed within the traditional dualisms of realism/idealism and materialism/idealism (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001, p. 108-111).

Even though Laclau and Mouffe explicitly states that discourse theory is not founded metaphysically (Mouffe, 1996; Laclau and Mouffe, 2002, p. 22) I have not been able to find anywhere in their authorship, where they – in the light of discourse theory’s (own) implications – have looked self-critically and reflexively on the question of discoursetheory’s (metaphysical) status. This is one of the reasons why I am arguing in favour of a synthesis or mutual inspiration of discourse theory and weak thinking.

It is not hereby said that humans cannot misunderstand or consciously mislead one another. What is said is that the problem of the psychology of the alien / the problem of solipsism, as a general problem is to be considered a pseudo problem.

Our age of crisis has taken many more forms than just the widespread rejection of Enlightenment ideals. Possibly, its most visible contemporary manifestations are: (a) the devastation of the planet’s “ecological equilibrium” (25); (b) the consistent anthropological impoverishment and individualistic atomisation of human societies (e.g. “social conflicts” read as individual “psychic problems” [26]; “anomie” [31]; “confusion between… [individual] success and… [collective] understanding” [32]); and (c) the undiminished international instability (e.g. religion’s “self-destructive forms” [63]; “Western military interventions in various areas of the planet” [77] ).

Patiently and laboriously, Habermas has addressed in his complex oeuvre all of the aforementioned forms of crisis of our age. It is Giacomantonio’s task to survey Habermas’ accounts in this slender book (99 pages).

Specifically, Giacomantonio praises the erudite, articulate and abstract “theoretical wealth” of leading German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) as a rare exception to current scholarly and scientific trends (78). Avoiding academic partisanships and specialist parochialisms, Habermas is said to have scrutinised and engaged with an “ample spectrum of stances” in the attempt to provide a reasoned, synthetic as well as analytical understanding of the enduring age of crisis (77). Swimming against the current, Habermas believes the Enlightenment project—modernity itself—to have to be brought to completion, not discarded.

Habermas’ first major intellectual accomplishments are claimed to be his 1960s and 1970s studies in the economic and administrative structures of late-modern Western industrial societies. Then, Habermas focused primarily upon the legitimisation of such structures via political procedures of mass participation, as well as upon the growing class fluidity, which Giacomantonio describes as the “dissolution” and “fragmentation” of traditional class consciousness and discourses (25).

According to Habermas, the post-war decades had seen capitalist societies benefiting from large-scale entrepreneurial pursuits, under the cooperative scrutiny and sophisticated direction of the State, which allowed these pursuits to serve vastly accepted inclusive social aims (e.g. “urban and regional planning”, “research and development”, “unemployment benefits”, “public welfare”; 25). These aims facilitated the legitimisation of the pursuits themselves, as well as the State’s own authority. Then, this virtuous circularity ended. For Habermas, the 1970s mark the beginning of the age of crisis.

The 1970s “late” or “mature” capitalism (23) continued to display massive State intervention in the economy. Yet, an increasing outgrowth of private interests started to escape from State control, leading to “systemic” failures (24) and to a generalised loss of faith in the State. This reduction of legitimacy was indicated by declining political participation, which was due too to the opacity of class consciousness in now tertiary-dominated economies. A variety of rescue plans were implemented by national governments, often via ever-increasing State intervention and techno-scientific legitimisation thereof. Regularly, these plans proved of little success, at least as the previous inclusive social aims were concerned.

Rather, the recurring reliance upon science and technology as grounds for political action induced considerable “de-politicisation” (28) of collective life and institutional decision-making. Within this novel frame of reference, whereby political issues were turned into “technical problems”(28), the public opinion was morphed into a passive spectator or sheer recipient of the diktats of a self-enclosed—and often self-serving—“expert” bureaucracy. In any case, the vastly accepted inclusive social aims of the post-war decades started to wane, becoming a more and more remote memory of better, foregone times.

It is Habermas’ opinion that the highly educated “expert” bureaucrats of recent decades have failed consistently to perceive the unavoidable connection between factual scientific investigation and value-driven technical application. To counter this phenomenon, Habermas has recommended the establishment of a more open critical exchange amongst experts and between experts and the public at large. In this perspective, communication should serve as an antidote to the former’s intellectual insularity and to the latter’s political disaffection.

Concerned with the de-politicisation of socio-political phenomena and populations of democratic countries, Habermas began to explore the socio-political relevance of “communication and linguistic dimensions” that were to become the hallmark of his later intellectual production (31). Indeed, the 1980s witnessed a vast output of studies by Habermas on the deeper structures of anthropological impoverishment and atomisation in modern nations. In them, Habermas came to conceive of “society” as comprising: (a) the “system” of professional, formal networks of “strategic behaviour”; and (b) the personal, informal “life-world” of existentially meaningful behaviour (“Lebenswelt”; 31). On the one hand, human activity was being described by Habermas as the “success” or “influence” of the competitive individual; whilst on the other stood the truly life-defining, cooperative linguistic (“communicative”) praxes seeking mutual “understanding” and engendering shared “identities” (32).

Initiating the age of crisis, the former dimension had been invading the latter by using communication instrumentally, i.e. the shared linguistic means for genuine self-expression and social cohesion were turned into sheer means of self-maximisation. To respond to this invasion, Habermas has recommended the overcoming of national barriers and the creation of a “cosmopolitan… deliberative democracy” centred upon ethical and normative issues and aims (35). Roughly speaking, more conversation about justice, the common good and the like–as already anticipated in his reflections on science and technology of the 1970s–would mean more democracy; more democracy would mean more legitimacy; more legitimacy more effective laws; and more effective laws more social and socially acceptable results. All of this, however, should be taking place on a global scale.

Habermas’ reflections on democracy became even more relevant in the 1990s. Then, in the face of an even faster-paced post-Cold-War economic and cultural globalisation, it was the very cradle of modern democracy that was to experience its deepest crisis, i.e. the nation State as such. Apart from intensifying the problems that Habermas had already tackled in the 1970s and 1980s, fin-de-siècle globalisation further deprived States of the crucial means of control over the “economic dimension” (40). In particular, free capital trade robbed the State of those vital “fiscal” resources that were needed for its administrative functions (44). Weaker States became even less credible to the populations, whose interests they were still expected to serve. The legitimacy of their power and even their own raison d’être became shakier. In the process, the vastly accepted inclusive social aims of the post-war decadeswere even openly rejected by leading parties and statesmen, who engaged actively in the persistent reduction of the public sphere. Deprived of the State’s support, larger and larger sectors of the population found themselves poorer, marginalised, and more vulnerable.

In the final decade of the 20th century, Habermas stressed further his commitment to a “cosmopolitan” solution of the ongoing crisis (43). In his view, a global economy needs a global deliberative democracy. This is not the same thing as to say that the world needs a world State. Rather, the world needs actual world politics and actual world policies. International organisations are already in place (e.g. the “United Nations”, the “World Trade Organisation”, the “International Monetary Fund” [46]). What is missing is the democratic appropriation of those institutions as positive means for global governance.

Interestingly, the “European Union” has been described by Habermas as an example of existing trans-national coordination and a possible force for progress, which he understands as the generation of a new political community reflecting truly democratic values and substantial ethico-political aims, such as solidarity and social inclusion (45). As an opposite model of global governance, Habermas has often highlighted the “hegemonic unilateralism” of the United States of America, which has accompanied throughout an economic globalisation capable of producing a “more unjust… more insecure” world and a threat to our “survival” as a species (48).

In particular, Habermas has stressed of late the centrality of the rule of law for the proper functioning of any complex social arrangement. As opposed to the brutal force exemplified by military intervention, a binding legal framework springing from democratic deliberation would constitute in his view a powerful means to a noble, desirable end: “to include the other without assimilating him” (50).

As further explained and substantiated in Habermas’ works of the 2000s, democracy should be thought of as much more than just a set of public institutions and formal procedures, for it is also an array of informal social praxes and individual forms of conduct. Within his deliberative and cosmopolitan model of democratic rule, Habermas has ended up combining the “liberty of the ancients” with the “liberty of the moderns” (51). In other words, both republican active participation and liberal individual-rights-protecting public guarantees are embraced as important components of actual democracy. Societies need both enduring compromises amongst rights-endowed self-interested individuals and the formation and expression of collective will via societal “self-clarification” (37).

Habermas resolves in an analogous manner the tension between liberals and communitarians on the much-debated issues of multiculturalism (51-6) and religious tolerance (61-8). Both universal, trans-cultural principles and cultural rights are said to be important for the socially inclusive survival of democratic States in a more and more inter-connected international reality. Disagreements and problems are bound to arise; still, what matters most is to have enough institutional and conceptual resources as to be able to tackle such disagreements and problems without falling into either coercion or social disintegration, which destroy genuine social cohesion and solidarity (54-6).

This, albeit sketchy, is the overview of Habermas’ intellectual production that Francesco Giacomantonio offers in his new book. It is indeed a clear and effective account of Habermas’ nearly unique oeuvre, as the author of the Introduction to the Political Thought of Habermas cites Touraine and Castoriadis as the only other equally daring grand theorists of recent times (80). The book comprises six chapters, an introduction, some final considerations and an appendix by another author. The presentation waves between a thematic subdivision and a chronological organisation of the material. Either way, the book addresses all the essential aspects of Habermas’ vast production. By this feat alone, it deserves much praise.

If any criticism is to be passed on it, then it must be pointed out that the book could be even more slender: the appendix by Angelo Chielli is redundant and unnecessary (83-90); whilst the 6th chapter, which deals with Habermas’ relevance to contemporary academic pursuits (69-75), could have been reduced to, and included with, the author’s final considerations (77-81). Also, the book would benefit from an analytical index of cited topics and authors.

Romanticism was largely a reaction to the rational and materialist pursuit of modern science and the secularism of the Enlightenment philosophy. In Germany, a number of Romantic poets rejected Immanuel Kant‘s vision of art as being governed by reason, and rather saw art as juxtaposed with nature as a second language communicated by God to the human being. In this way, however, they also joined forces with science and philosophy by attempting to comprehend being, albeit through different means. The ‘productive imagination’, a notion originally coined by Kant in his Kritik der Urteilskraft, was conceived as a basic power of all creative potencies. It was held to simultaneously beget and behold, and that its beheld ideas were no arbitrary occurrences within the subjective mind, but revelations of nature, of the first cause of existence, of the world-spirit, of God. Novalis, for example, saw this task of realizing ideas as connecting the philosopher and the poet: the former works with concepts, the latter with symbols and signs. Both Novalis and Friedrich von Schlegel speak of philosophical or transcendental poetry which they see as necessary in the time of German Idealism.[1] From this point of view, art does not constitute an isolated sphere, but promises on the contrary a profound kind of knowledge and understanding. Friedrich Schelling went so far as to regard art as the organ of the absolute, in which “the invisible barrier separating the real and the ideal world is raised.”[2] For the Romantics, then, art became Kant’s ‘intellectual intuition’. This was a complete break from the Platonic view of art as identified with lies and deceptions – art now became the organ of absolute truth.

At the same time in Italy, however, Romanticism did not find much fertile ground in which to sow its seeds. On the contrary, it rather sowed seeds of distrust in the Italian mind. There were in particular two reasons for this. Firstly, Romanticism introduced a radically novel kind of poetry that both implicitly and explicitly threatened the Latin classicist tradition. The Italian classicists, who found their artistic ideals in the mythological language of Cicero, Horace and Virgil, reacted furiously to to this new foreign movement that now provoked both the structure and the content of both classical poetry and thought. Secondly, however, its “barbaric Anglo-Teutonic” and Protestant origin aroused suspicion and aversion in Catholic Italy, not because the Italians were all rigorously Catholic (in fact, many had turned away from Christianity), but because Protestantism was decisively renounced as if by instinct. Outcries were frequent against the Gothic, the Nordic, and Romantic literature, as well as against the despotism of “the Huns, the Goths and the Vandals”.[3]

Leopardi’s reaction to Romanticism, as well as the German, including the Kantian, philosophy, certainly contains elements of the general tone of protest in Italy as depicted above. However, his responses differ from the mainstream due to his own rather idiosyncratic philosophy. He provides an anthropological explanation of Romanticism and German philosophy as distinctive expressions of Nordic culture, concentrating on physical factors as being the determinants of the general Nordic character. His attitude to German philosophy, moreover, is complex. On the one hand he decisively rejects it, but on the other he expresses his admiration. This may seem paradoxical but will be elucidated in the following. In the first part of this essay, however, I will discuss Leopardi’s main existential perspective as well as his rather bleak view of modernity, scientific progress and the Enlightenment philosophy of the eighteenth century.

Leopardi was concerned about the consequences of modernity for human life. He strove to find ways to bridge the abyss separating the old and the new order of Western society and thought. This is summed up rather neatly by Antonio Gramsci:

In Leopardi one finds, in an extremely dramatic form, the crisis of transition towards modern man; the critical abandonment of the old transcendental conception but not as yet the finding of the new moral and intellectual ubi consistam which would give the same certainty as the jettisoned faith…[4]

Scientific progress and rationalization had undermined both religious faith and any kind of foundation attempting to ground a metaphysical significance of human life. According to Leopardi, the universe emerging from this development turns out to be mechanistic, material and deterministic. Influenced by French materialist thinkers such as Julien Offray de la Mettrie and Paul-Henri Baron d’Holbach, he conceives of all phenomena, including the human being, as connected blindly in an endless chain of cause and effect according to which they will all be destroyed and their substance amalgamate into other beings. In Leopardi’s “Dialogue between Nature and an Icelander”, the wretched Icelander who travels all over the world only to find a spot where he can be free from pain and suffering, gets to hear this harsh truth about the world from Mother Nature herself:

You plainly show that you have not realized that the life of the universe is a perpetual circle of production and destruction, both linked to each other in such a way that each of them constantly serves the other, and is necessary to conserve the existence of the world; which, if either of them should fail, would swiftly be dissolved. Thus, if anything within the world were free from suffering, the world itself would be harmed.[5]

As Gramsci notes, Leopardi represents the emotional shock in Western culture brought about by a new level of understanding that undermines meaning in an existence that now presents itself as being merely contingent. Leopardi accepted this new understanding and consequently renounced Christianity to take up a radical kind of materialistic atheism, yet dedicated his life to find a remedy for the existential evil of modernity.

In this endeavour, Leopardi adopted a stance to life that could be termed eudamonistic. He identifies happiness as the sole aim of human life. As with the utilitarian thinkers, he further identifies happiness with pleasures, and regards pleasures as both sufficient and necessary means to obtain happiness. However, ‘pleasures’ in his understanding of the term do not explicitly refer to sentiments, but is a catch-all word for everything actually desired by living beings.[6]

Leopardi further states that the human being’s desire for pleasure, and thus for happiness, is a natural instinct. Just as all sentient creatures, human beings are self-loving beings. This merely means that they want to fulfil their desires since they believe that the objects of their desires would lead to happiness, for otherwise they would not be desired at all. From self-love also emanates the tendency to self-preservation, or, in other words, the love of life. But since the love of life emanates from the love of self, and is therefore a secondary derivation from human beings’ instinctual gratification through pleasure, the object of their love is not life as such, but the happiness for which life is an indispensable condition and instrument: “a happy life would undoubtedly be good; but as ‘happy’, not as ‘life’. An unhappy life, for the very reason of being unhappy, is evil.”[7]

The problem with the desire for pleasure is that it is unlimited, because it is not a desire for specific concrete pleasures but for the pleasure, an abstract, absolute, infinite, unlimited pleasure. The existential problem in human living emerges in the actual desire for particular existent pleasures, for these are all finite and thus cannot satisfy the desire for the infinite. Leopardi illustrates this with the following example:

If you desire to possess a horse, it seems to you that you desire it as a horse and as a particular pleasure. But in fact you desire it as an abstract and unlimited pleasure. When you then find yourself in possession of the horse, you encounter a pleasure that is necessarily restricted, and, because of the unsatisfied state of your actual desire, you sense a feeling of emptiness in your soul. And even if it were possible to satisfy it in terms of extension, it would be impossible in terms of duration, because the nature of things also commands that nothing is eternal.[8]

Pleasures accessible to the human being are therefore all limited both in time and space, whereas the desire for pleasure is without limits in either dimension. Failing to find its end in any of the finite pleasures of the world, the desire is condemned to remain in a state of unfulfilment until it is terminated altogether as life itself comes to an end. This is the core of Leopardi’s pessimistic view of human life: the inability of innate natural desire to reach the infinite climax in finite terrestrial reality causes life to be an essential misery.

But in what sense is this a particular characteristic of modernity? Leopardi follows, to some extent, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s view of the human being’s corruption and alienation from nature. From Leopardi’s point of view, it especially has to do with the thirst for and acquisition of knowledge:

I believe that within the natural order, the human being can be happy also in this world, provided that he lives according to nature and like animals, that is, without grand or unique or vivid pleasures, but in a more or less constantly equal and temperate state of happiness… But I do not believe that we are any longer capable of this sort of happiness after having acquired knowledge of the vanity of all things and of the illusions as well as of the nothingness of the natural pleasures themselves, which is something that we were not even supposed to suspect.[9]

It is, in other words, the realization, the knowledge, of the nullity of things that constitutes the human being’s corruption. The conscious awareness of the natural contradiction that nature lacks the capacity to satisfy the human being’s desires adds to his unhappiness to such an extent that life becomes unbearable. When this realization becomes ascendant in someone’s mind, that person will find himself in the terrifying state of boredom, or noia. Leopardi’s complex notion of boredom seems close to what is usually termed nihilism. Psychologically, boredom comes to the fore when someone becomes fully cognizant of the futility of the innate desire for pleasure and thus sterilizes it. The desire is fully present, and above all sensed, but it is sensed as a desire detached from its objects, because the subject knows that these cannot be reached, and therefore renounces them.

Leopardi attributes this unhappy state to the development of human rationality. Not that reason as such is evil, but it has crossed the borders within which it can function as a useful and, indeed, necessary tool for the human being, and thereby changed into a rather different entity to which Leopardi refers as acquired or unnatural reason. The original ‘primitive’ reason fully conforms with nature in mediating between premises and conclusions by means of simple but crucial judgments. If I experience hunger and feel inclination toward food, ‘primitive’ reason draws the conclusion from these premises that food is something good. It therefore makes value-judgments, or, as Leopardi puts it, beliefs (credenze), without which the human being would be unable to remain alive.[10] Thus, the human being in a state of nature makes perfectly rational judgments. However, such reasoning is not exclusively human. Every animal makes comparable kinds of judgment, relative only to itself and its own well-being. As long as reason’s function is limited in this way, to merely making judgments relative to the interests of those it serves, it promotes life according to nature, or a happy life. However, as soon as it transcends this simple function, it begins to be harmful:

Human beings, and, proportionately, animals, are rational by nature. I therefore do not condemn reason to the degree that it is a natural quality and essential for life, but only to the degree … that it grows and modifies in a way to become the principal obstacle to our happiness, instrument of unhappiness, enemy of the other natural qualities … belonging to human being and human life.[11]

This acquired kind of reason is a corrupt kind of reason that will not limit itself to fulfil the modest task assigned to it by nature, but begins to aspire to truths in conformity to itself, that is to say, truths independent of the relative needs of living beings and the utility for their lives. Instead of being satisfied with subjective beliefs, this developed kind of reason aims at objectivity and absolute truths. Leopardi often identifies this reason with the analytical, calculative and scientific raison of the eighteenth century Enlightenment philosophy: it is the instrumental reason of progress and development, of accumulated truths, and of the identification of the true with the good. For the human being, the evil consequences of this reason derive from its aspiration to absolute truth, for such can never be found. The only truths that can be found, according to Leopardi, are those derived at by ‘primitive’ reason in order to serve the interests of the living being in question. For anything resembling absolute truth would require knowledge of all the relations of that truth with other truths. Nothing can be known as such, or in itself, for nature or existence is a system in which things only manifest themselves relative to other things. Therefore, since

…it can be said that we cannot know any truth perfectly, however insignificant, isolated or particular it may seem, as long as we do not know perfectly all its relations with all the subsistent truths, [we can just as well] say that no truth (however minimal, however evident, clear and simple) has ever been or will ever be perfectly and entirely known from all sides.[12]

This would seem to imply epistemological relativism, and in another passage Leopardi explicitly confirms it:

It is said that every proposition has two aspects whence it is deduced that every truth is relative. But let us note that every proposition, every theorem, every object of speculation, every single thing has not only two but infinite faces, from the point of view of each of which one can consider, contemplate, demonstrate and believe with reason and truth… And anything can be affirmed, and also denied, about every single thing; which demonstrates most vividly and directly that there is no absolute truth.[13]

Given this incommensurable antagonism between nature’s relativity and reason’s aspiration to non-relative unconditioned truths, reason is doomed to failure, resulting in two interrelated and deplorable consequences for the human being.

First, the further reason travels through the universe the more worlds it discovers, demonstrating the smallness and insignificance of the human being. For instance, when Copernicus disclosed an apparent infinity of worlds functioning in much the same way as our own, he “debased the idea of the human being”[14] by depriving him of his former uniqueness as a focus of the universe. Secondly, however, and more importantly, since reason cannot function ‘positively’ by discovering absolute truths, it can only function ‘negatively’, that is, by eliminating prior errors. Even the truths that it conceives of having discovered are later refuted by itself. Thus, great discoveries are nothing but discoveries of great errors. The same applies to the modern (eighteenth century) philosophical ideas themselves:

Modern philosophy affirms that all ideas held by the human being proceed from the senses. This may seem a positive proposition. But it would be frivolous without the prior error of innate ideas, just as it would be frivolous to affirm that the sun heats, because no one has believed that the sun does not heat, nor affirmed that the sun cooled. Rather, the intention and the spirit of the proposition that all our ideas come from the senses is really negative, and the proposition is as if one said: the human being does not receive any idea other than by means of the senses…[15]

In this way, reason has become a sort of inquisition against errors and superstitions that were previously held to be truths. This negativity of reason entails that the progress it claims to uphold is itself purely negative:

It is true that the progress of the human spirit consists, and hitherto consisted, not in learning but principally in unlearning … in realizing that the human being always knows less, in diminishing the number of cognitions, and restricting the vastness of the human sciences. This is truly the spirit and the principal substance of our progress from the eighteenth century until now, even though not everyone, indeed not many, have come to this realization.[16]

Through its desctruction of the illusions of antiquity, this regress, usually termed progress, has gradually brought about the realization of the nothingness of the world. Not that the things that exist are nothing, for in one sense they are something by virtue of existing. But for human desire that can only be satisfied with infinity, all the things and pleasures that exist, are, because of their finitude and transience, as good as nothing. “In this way, they are nothing to the human being’s happiness, while not being nothing in themselves.”[17] Only the illusions have been able to deceive the human being by giving the appearance of infinity and eternity, and thus make him retain a belief in a meaningful world in which he takes passionate interest.

In this very same process, Christianity, itself a philosophical empire basing itself on the domination of reason over nature, of the spirit over the body, played a crucial role by destroying the beliefs and illusions of antiquity. Now another philosophical empire, namely the rational empiricism of the eighteenth century, is conquering Christianity. The last chain in the sequence has been broken and the world stands there in its meaningless nudity. Half a century before Nietzsche, Leopardi decisively declares God’s death:

It is clear that the destruction of the innate ideas destroys the principle of the good, beauty, absolute perfection, and their contraries. This applies to perfection, etc., which would have a foundation, a reason, a form anterior to the existence of the subjects containing it, and would therefore be eternal, immutable, necessary, primordial and existing prior to these subjects, as well as being independent of them. Now where does this reason, this form, exist? And in what does in consist? And how can we know and recognize it if every idea derives from sensations relative to only existing objects? To suppose the absolute beautiful and good is to return to Platonic ideas, and to revive innate ideas after having destroyed them. Since these have been removed, there is no other possible reason for things having absolutely, abstractly and necessarily to be as they are … [except] every factual thing, which in reality is the only reason for everything, and is thus always and solely relative. Thus nothing is good, beautiful, true, bad, ugly or false, if not relatively; and therefore, the correlation between things is, so to speak, absolutely relative… It is certain that when the Platonic forms pre-existent to things are destroyed, God is destroyed.[18]

II.

By claiming art to be the potential solution to the problems of modernity, Leopardi certainly incorporates a Romantic tendency. But he severely criticizes the Romantic outlook, and his criticism is in line with the contrast that he sees between reason and nature. By having explained its occurrences, reason has deprived nature of its previously held mysterious qualities and, instead, reduced it to mere mechanical laws. Having been disenchanted in this manner, nature is now unable to concede the pleasures that it offered so spontaneously before. This radical transformation, however, is not a transformation having taken place in nature, but in the human being. Given that the ancients, with all their ignorance of the workings of nature, gained pleasure from poetry, Leopardi insists that we should concentrate on and investigate their methods of drawing from nature all the pleasure emanating from its imitation. For, as he says, “the beauties of nature … do not change with the changes of those who observe them…”, in fact, “no mutation of human beings ever induces an alteration in nature…” Therefore, since “nature does not adapt to us, it is necessary that we adapt to nature, and, moreover, poetry must not, as demanded by the modern [Romantics], undergo mutation, but is in its principal characteristics immutable like nature itself.”[19]

Leopardi agrees with the Romantics that the poet must imitate nature, but his conception of nature is the unmediated, spontaneous, physical, non-thinking life of passion. Since the faculty of imagination is a part of this nature, the poet produces images that are natural. Correspondingly, he severely attacks the Romantic understanding of nature as a metaphysical or ontological entity. Such ideas, he says, are ultimately the outcome of the enhancement of reason. Hence the Romantics are not poeticizing about nature but about civilization, and this, in Leopardi’s view, is not poetry at all.[20] The same complaint applies to the task assigned to poetry by the Romantics as being an ‘organ of truth’. To use poetry as a means to obtain truth simply obstructs its proper task of providing pleasure, for poetry must be deceptive in order to fulfil the second task. The negative consequences of the Romantic quest for truth, Leopardi further argues, can be seen in its insistence on the exploration of pathetic sentimentality, a form of ‘scientific psychology’, which is purely artificial, having nothing to do with natural sentiments and merely expressing the sickness of modern civilization.[21]

Leopardi holds on to the Platonic view of art and poetry as sources of deception. However, he takes this to be a positive function. By insisting upon the deceptive powers of poetry, Leopardi wishes to bring the human being into closer conformity with nature by enhancing the role of the imagination in the human mind. The virtue of imagination is that it deceives our desire for the infinite into believing that it has acquired it. And thus happiness, obtainable only by means of infinite pleasure, can be felt when we, in our ignorance, are unable to behold the limits of the indefinite pleasure that we experience. Hence ignorance is a precondition for happiness:

The faculty of imagination … is the main source of human happiness. The more it rules in the human being, the happier he will become. We see this in children. But it cannot rule without ignorance, at least a certain kind of ignorance, as with the ancients. The cognition of the true, that is, of the limits and definitions of things, restricts imagination.[22]

The ignorance of the ancients brought them happiness and contentment with the world. But, as Leopardi himself realizes, these times are long gone:

I prefer the savage stage to the civilized one. But having set off and arrived at a certain stage, it is impossible to reverse the development of the spirit, impossible to hinder the progress of individuals no less than peoples. For times immemorial, the individuals and nations of Europe, as well as a great part of the world, have been in possession of a developed spirit. To revert to the state of the primitive and the savage is impossible.[23]

The ignorance of the ancients cannot be reconstructed. The illusions that previously produced the appearance of meaning in the world have now been annihilated. However, this does not entail that there are no myths and illusions left in the modern world. On the contrary, the benevolent myths have been exchanged for particularly malignant ones. This is because reason itself is a creator of myths, of “hideous and acerbic myths”.[24] They are brought to expression in the Enlightenment belief in the coincidental progress of truth and happiness, and in the equivalence of the rational, the good and the beautiful. A comparison between the modern human being with all his truths, however, and the human being of antiquity living in midst of deceptions reveals the superiority of the latter in terms of the happiness that it produces:

[the human being] needs to know what works for his sake. Absolute truth … is indifferent to the human being. His happiness may consist in both true and false cognition and judgment. Crucial is that his judgment be truly suitable for his nature.[25]

The problem, however, is that this realization can only be arrived at after truth, with all its dreadful consequences, has revealed itself. Having reached that stage, it is not easy to see how truth could be disposed of and exchanged for a more favourable interpretation of the world. This rather alarming paradox does not escape Leopardi’s attention:

I am not unaware of the fact that the ultimate conclusion we draw from true and perfect philosophy is that we must not philosophize. From this we infer, first, that philosophy is useless, for to achieve the effect of non-philosophizing, we do not need to be philosophers; secondly, that it is extremely harmful, for that ultimate conclusion can be learned only at one’s own expense, and once it has been learned, it cannot be put in operation because it is not in the power of human beings to forget the truths they already know…[26]

When Leopardi refers to philosophy in this manner he means of course the empirical materialist philosophy of the Enlightenment, the “true and geometrical”, as he calls it, which has undermined the plausibility of any systematic metaphysics that attempts to construct a teleological scheme of the universe. A philosophy such as Kant’s, therefore, is to him no less plausible than a dreamy fairy tale, however much he would like to be able to adhere to such “poems of reason”.[27] In his essay, Discourse on the Present State of the Customs of the Italians, he endeavours to explain the tendency in German thought, philosophy and literature by contrasting it with the Italian national character.

He paints a rather bleak portrait of Italian society as hypocritical and morally degenerate. Italians, he says, only care for the appearance of morality, i.e. for the favourable opinion of themselves that they believe others will have of them if they behave outwardly in a certain manner. This is the only foundation left for morality in Italy. The hypocritical character of Italians surpasses by far the hypocricy of other European nations. This is because Italians are in one sense more ‘advanced’ than the nations of Northern Europe. The fact that the Italians are much less fruitful than the Germans, the French and the English in the construction of theoretical philosophy is simply one side of the coin of their being more advanced in the practice of philosophy. In other words, Italians have realized the futility and meaninglessness of constructing fantastic philosophical systems without foothold in reality, while the Italian hypocrisy, egotism and indifference to others is a result of having realized the collapse of the metaphysical foundations of morality, which leaves behind a complete kind of moral relativism.[28]

The anthropological reason for this unhappy state of the Italians is that they are closer to nature in the sense that they possess more inner sensitivity, i.e. are more acutely aware of their environment, than North-Europeans. Being closer to nature might imply greater happiness, but in this case it actually works in such a way that Italians are more acutely affected by civilization. Therefore, they are far less susceptible to illusions which alone can preserve morality. Nordic people, on the contrary, are less sensitive, hence less susceptible to the disillusionment of civilization, and their imagination is more easily aroused.[29] In other words, they are slower in internalizing the inescapable consequences of modernity. The Nordic peoples are now the warmest in spirit, the most imaginative, the most animated and those who are most easily influenced by illusions; they are the most sentimental, have the greatest character, spirit and customs in Europe, and thus produce the greatest poetry and literature. They are much closer to the ancient in that they are less ‘advanced’ with regard to the corruptive effects of reason:

If we can find literature in our times (and in recent times) where systems and opinionated fictions are still in use, it is in England, and much more so in Germany, because one could really say that there is no literate man of any kind among the Germans who does not either make or follow a decisive system, and this is for the most part, as is the case with the usual and the ancient application of systems, a fiction.[30]

The systems constructed by modern philosophy are hence mere ‘opinionated fictions’ or ‘fantastic constructions’ that say little if anything about the world as it really is. The same applies to the philosophy of Kant:

In Germany, and partly also in England, one continually finds systems and fictions in all literature, in every kind of philosophy, in politics, in history, in criticism, and any segment of linguistics through to grammar, in particular related to ancient languages. For the longest time in Europe, there was no sect or school of such a philosophy [of systematic fictions], much less of metaphysics, until very recently in Germany … in the sect and school of Kant, which is precisely metaphysical, and which is again subdivided into diverse sects. Before Kant, it was the school of Wolff.[31]

Kant’s critical philosophy is thus deemed by Leopardi as being derived and deduced from the abstract speculative fantasies that the latter calls metaphysics. He displays clear admiration for German culture, as well as for its philosophical fictions and systems that he claims to be a fruit of the Occidental residuum of the imaginative ‘virginity’ of antiquity. But however enchanting, these constructions cannot be a viable alternative to him, for it is precisely this kind of philosophizing that has been rendered unpersuasive and virtually ridiculous by the modern empirical philosophy of the Enlightenment.

III.

We have seen that Leopardi is fully aware of the impossibility of returning to the primitive natural state. The most we can possibly do is to imitate the superior happiness enjoyed by the ancients; the happiness deriving from ignorance can never be resurrected. Nor can we refrain from philosophizing, even though we know that it would make us happier. But this does not mean that all is lost. Leopardi suggests an attempt to find a certain balance between reason and nature. The following passage could in fact be a reference to Kant and his insistence on the moral law:

Reason is never as efficient as the passions. Listen to what the philosophers say: the human being ought to be moved by reason, just as, or rather much more than, by passion; indeed, he ought to be moved by reason and duty only. Nonsense. Human nature and the nature of things can certainly be corrupted but not corrected … We do not need to extinguish passion with reason, but to convert reason into passion; to turn duty, virtue, heroism, etc., into passions.[32]

Leopardi’s way out of the human being’s dreary valley of tears consists in carrying out even further the Enlightenment quest for truth. Reason’s domination is accepted, and the truth of the human being’s miserable state in the universe cannot be ignored, but by naturalizing reason, that is, by combining it with the natural faculty of imagination, reason can also move into the human realm and discover that which is “truly suitable for his nature”. Therefore,

It is wholly indispensable that [a philosopher] is a great and perfect poet; not in order to reason as a poet, but rather to examine with his cold reasoning and calculation that which only the very ardent poet can know.[33]

This may seem paradoxical, but it is at this stage that reason, and thus philosophy, by inquiring into the quite different truth of the human being’s necessary aspirations, reaches its culmination by realizing its own superfluousness. However, the paradox vanishes as soon as we see that reason has simultaneously been transformed. In addition to the realm of external nature, the scope of philosophy has now been expanded to embrace as well the realm of inner human nature. The discipline of naturalized reason, the new expanded philosophy, is what Leopardi calls ‘ultraphilosophy’. Since reason cannot reverse its development and become primitive again, it has to exceed its own limits and transcend itself. In other words, since reason has eliminated the possibility of reviving the ancient faith in the illusions,

our regeneration depends, so to speak, on an ultraphilosophy that brings us closer to nature by exploring the entirety and the interior of things. And this ought to be the fruit of the extraordinarily enlightened men of this century.[34]

By exploring the particular human domain, this new kind of philosophy does not seek absolute truths or facts but values pertaining to the happiness of the human being. While these values shed a clear light on the harmfulness of philosophy for us, there is no need to delve into the problem of how to dispose of it. For at this stage, philosophy has already developed into a different kind of philosophy, a sort of synthesis of the philosophy of ‘advanced’ reason and the one of ‘primitive’ reason. This new philosophy aims at value-judgments relative to the human being only with exclusive consideration of the special circumstances of modern human life, which is mainly the outcome of instrumental reason’s domination.

Being naturalized, Leopardi´s ultraphilosophy has disposed of the value-laden dualism that typifies the Platonic-Christian tradition. Rather, there is a turn towards celebrating the body. The human being is, in Leopardi´s understanding, a mere body, but, more importantly, the human being´s happiness consists in the vividness of sensations and of life, a vividness that is never as great as when physically experienced.[35] Leopardi seeks to revive the importance of the passions and of physical activity, and, accordingly, reduce the tendency to contemplation, which to him is a sure sign of corruption. Contemplation merely enforces the inner sensitivity of life, which, because of its conscious non-spontaneous character, merely leads to unhappiness. On the other hand, the multiplicity, novelty and singularity of physical sensations distract the mind from recognizing the limits of things, and by fulfilling many little pleasures the human being would have the impression and illusion of infinite pleasure.

This is precisely what Leopardi means by imitating nature. He agrees with the Romantics that imitation is not equivalent to copying, but with ‘nature’ he means creative spontaneity. However, he rejects the Romantic ontological view of nature and sees it instead as a constantly impulsive physical entity. What Leopardi sees as good in nature is precisely its spontaneous vital spark, its constant movement and unpremeditated motion.[36] His endorsed vitalism is meant to bring the human being closer to the mobility and spontaneity of both nature and animals. It is worth noting, in this respect, that Leopardi decisively turns away from the tendency in Occidental thought to aim at constancy, at the fixation of the human being´s natural and social environment through eternal Platonic or even Kantian transcendental ideas. An excessive effort to freeze or paralyze nature, both in its workings outside of the human being but not least within him, merely serves to enhance his conscious misery. If we want to reduce such feelings, Leopardi says, we must succumb to nature and try to live in harmony with it by adapting to it.[37]

It is significant that the poet-philosopher who opts for the enhancement of the body and adaptation to nature is an enlightened philosopher. He has become keenly aware of the metaphysical meaninglessness of being. But in order to release himself from the oppressive consciousness of his awareness, he indulges in ‘natural’ actions, i.e. corporeal activities or imaginative conceptualizations, in order to put it temporarily aside. In this sense, while in a state of distraction, he is ignorant of his unfortunate but inescapable fate, and, for a moment, imagination reigns. The completely enlightened person is, in other words, capable of producing in himself a semblance of ignorance that temporarily imitates the ignorance of the ancients. And this can only happen through artistic experience: “The human being hates inactivity, and wants to be liberated from it through fine art.”[38] Fine art, and poetry in particular, arouses the imagination, deceives the senses, and can produce a certain ‘second sight’:

To the sensitive and imaginative person … the world and the objects are in a certain sense double. His eyes will see a tower, a farmland; his ears will hear the tolling of a bell; and, at the same time, his imagination will see another tower, another farmland, hear another tolling. It is the objects of this second kind that contain all the beautiful and pleasant aspects of things.[39]

By reviving its mythological language, poetry not only distracts the person from his dread of living, but also induces in him a particular view of life, a curious combination of a pragmatic and an aesthetic view of life, which, on a cognitive level, is known not to correspond to reality but which both produces happiness, and, by strengthening certain values, gives rise to action. Leopardi often argues that ancient values such as patriotism, virtue, heroism, glory and honour, all illusions, were the cornerstones of true morality, a morality of conviction, when moral actions were believed to be ends in themselves, not mere means to the agent´s own egotistic ends. Not only did these values preserve morality but also provided life with precious meaning and produced happiness by provoking physical action, and preventing the human being from delving into excessive contemplation. Although these lost values cannot be revived, Leopardi contends that the ultraphilosopher is capable of adopting a certain aesthetic world-view conducive to his happiness. However, it also requires the adoption of conscious illusions:

The illusions cannot be condemned, disdained and persecuted except by those who are illusioned and believe that this world is, or could be, really something, and in fact something beautiful. This is a major illusion: and therefore the quasi-philosopher combats the illusions precisely because he is illusioned; the true philosopher loves and preaches them because he is not illusioned. And the combat against the illusions in general is the most certain sign of a totally imperfect and insufficient knowledge and of a notable illusion.[40]

Among the primary functions of the myths of antiquity was the transformation of the numinous indefiniteness, of the overwhelming powers of the unknown, into a nominal definiteness; they made the strange familiar and addressable, and thereby delivered the human being from the terror of being surrendered to an immensely more superior reality. Today, after the myths have collapsed, we must look mechanistic reality straight in the eye. But we can decorate and anthropomorphize the world so that it will, at least, have the appearance of being a world belonging to us – and a world in which we belong. It is the Apollonian transfiguring dream – but which must be known by the dreamer to be a dream.

Leopardi’s aim is therefore not to return to or preserve the past, but merely to find a substitute for the hope that we once possessed but have lost somewhere on our way. Such a substitute can be found in the faculty of imagination that momentarily enables us to regain the joy of living. Pleasure and joy must be the proper aim of poetry and art, for it is joy, not melancholy or sentimentality, that brings about the best results in dealing with the world. As Leopardi, says, the world does not like to hear crying – but laughing.[41] Sentimental poetry of lament, characterizing much of Romantic poetry, only serves to demonstrate the dreary truth of the human being’s vulnerability and insignificance and thus to obstruct the path towards happiness. This path, however, is arduous, and the force of the obstacles consists in their seductive powers; one is often tempted to collapse against them with a weary sigh and admit one’s surrender.

This applies not least to Leopardi himself whose poetry is not altogether free from Romantic sentimentality. In some passages he also expresses strong doubts about the possibility of resuscitating anything resembling the innocent joy of life as found in ancient poetry. In his later poetry in particular, however, he expresses this sentimentality with an unmistakable hint of cynicism. He often demands that we at least show enough strength to face nature’s evil creator and destructor with a cynical laugh; if we cannot laugh despite our misery, then the least we can do is to laugh at it:

I believe it to be much worthier of the human being and of magnanimous despair to laugh at our common ills rather than sighing, weeping and screeching together with the others and instigating them to do the same.[42]

To be sure, the Leopardian laughter still echoes in many valleys of Occidental thought.

[14] Ibid, 84. Nietzsche expresses a strikingly similar thought in his Genealogy of Morality, which, however, cannot be an influence of Leopardi‘s, since the Zibaldone was not published until 1898: “Isn’t it the case that since Copernicus the self-diminution of the human being and his will to self-diminution have been progressing without halt? Alas, the faith in his dignity, his uniqueness, his irreplaceable position in the chain of being has gone. The human being has become an animal, not a metaphorical animal, but absolutely and unconditionally — he, who in his earlier faith was almost God (“child of God,” “God-man”) … Since Copernicus the human being seems to have brought himself onto an inclined plane. He‘s now rolling at an accelerating rate past the mid-point. But where to? Into nothingness? Into the “penetrating sense of his own nothingness”? Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, Kritische Studienausgabe 5 (München: dtv/de Gruyter, 1988), 3:25, p. 404.

[37] See e.g. his prose “Elogio degli Uccelli” (Operette morali, pp. 225-237) in which he expresses his admiration for and even envy of birds that can never suffer from boredom because of their ability to move swiftly from one place to another.